NOVEMBER 3, 2023 –
DOUBLE BIRTHDAY DAY – GRINDSTONE LAKE, NORTHWEST WISCONSIN – AUGUST 7, 1997
The light, steady breeze played across the big, sun-splashed lake and teased the pine standing guard on the steep bank in front of the cabin. Drifting from the windows was the sound of an old recording of Jussi Björling, the Swedish tenor, singing Nessun Dorma. With no neighbors within earshot of our family’s summer cabin, Dad could crank up the CD-player to his heart’s delight, and little gave his heart more delight than classical music. He played it constantly, except when he was reading a book, which he also did constantly—except when he was listening to classical music.
I exaggerate. Dad did more than read books and listen to music. He was an accomplished writer and master of many practical things, from masonry to carpentry to plumbing to electrical wiring to felling trees to the many other aspects of maintaining a northwoods cabin in ship-shape condition and keeping it well-stocked with firewood. The cabin and the woods around it were his easel and his workshop, and he worked at them assiduously.
Every family has its stories, mundane and extraordinary. If few of our family’s stories originated at our cabin, many of them converged in the telling there, and over the decades, the place had become a storehouse of our most important memories.
Above the back door at the top of the stone and cement steps hangs the carved-wood sign that bears the name, Björnholm. That is the once improbable title Dad had assigned to the property in 1979, a full 40 years after his parents had acquired the land and built the cabin. Inside the doorway was the “back porch,” where on nice days in the late 50s and early 60s my Swedish grandmother served lunch—soup, carefully made sandwiches, pickled beets, knäckebröd, jam and butter, and a jar of Noon Hour-brand pickled herring, which we all called by its Swedish name, sil.
Beyond the back porch is the kitchen, which, like the entire interior of the cabin, is paneled with knotty pine. The kitchen is where my grandmother spent much of her time during summers at the cabin before she died in 1966. My three sisters and I were very close to her, and in her main domain, memories are still well preserved. Everything has its carefully chosen place and rank, right down to the scrub brushes and cleaning agents in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Fiestaware; drinking glasses (including those that started out as jam and jelly jars); pots and pans; fancy plates and bowls and hodge-podge versions (among them, one featuring an illustrated depiction of “The Fork Ran off with the Spoon,” which magically appeared if you ate all your oatmeal); cooking and eating utensils with which my grandmother prepared and served elaborate meals remain in use and stored where over half a century ago she thought best.
Hanging on the wall over the breadbox is a large framed colored photograph of her childhood home in Småland[1], the province in southern Sweden from which so many of her generation had emigrated. Next to the picture of the red two-story farmhouse is a cutting board bearing in large, blue lettering the words, Smör och bröd gör kinden röd[2]—“Butter and bread make the cheeks red.” To the left of the stove are photos of my grandparents, whose good looks and sartorial sensibilities they had passed down to my father and my three sisters.
Next to my grandmother’s picture is a photo of my grandmother’s sister, Jenny, after whom my younger sister was named. Another photo features old Jenny’s husband, Sigurd, whom early on we called, “Uncle Sugar,” partly because “sugar” was easier for us to say than “Sigurd” but also because of his sweet disposition, despite a hard life as a Norwegian sailor. When my sisters and I were young, Aunt Jenny and Uncle Sugar made annual summer trips to Björnholm long before it was so named. I will never forget how their lilting Scandinavian accents played like happy music inside my ears.
On a far wall hangs a very special photograph of our great-great grandparents, Sven Håkansson and his wife Sissa, in a black, decorated, antique frame. It is a studio picture taken in the 1870s in Sweden. Dad said Sven had come to America alone in the late 1860s with the expectation that his wife would follow once he got established. Dad didn’t say that Sven never got established or that Sissa got cold feet, but what Dad did say is that she never came to America, and after a short time in Minnesota, Sven went back to Sweden, “for keeps.” It took the luck and gumption of the old couple’s descendants for Dad’s side of our family to make it to America “for keeps.”
Not all the photos on the wall are of Scandinavian relatives. Two pictures are of my Vietnamese brothers, Thuan and Long—refugees that my parents sponsored when the Republic of South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. It had been Mother’s idea to bring them into our home, but Dad welcomed them with uncharacteristic spontaneity. He became quite close to them, but I think what drove Dad’s initial receptivity to the sponsorship idea was his vocal and vehement abhorrence of communism.
The kitchen area of the cabin gives way to a big open room with a high ceiling, all in knotty pine. At one end rises a huge, split-stone chimney, tapering toward the ceiling, with a thick-planked mantel above the fireplace. The stonework stands like a monument to Old-World craftsmanship—one of over 100 such fireplace chimneys, Dad told us, built by Carl Hansson—a Swede who had married one of my grandmother’s cousins and moved his family to the area in 1919 to build and operate resort cabins.
My grandparents had hired Carl to build our cabin, and his well-honed skills and good tastes and those of his predominantly Swedish crew are very much evident in the detail and construction of the place. Carl and his wife—my grandmother’s cousin—were the reason my grandparents had been frequent visitors to the area in the 1920s and 30s and starting in 1939, cabin owners and summer residents. The place was a good three-and-a-half hour drive from my grandparents’ home in Minneapolis.
On each side of Carl Hansson’s stone masterpiece is a large, casement window that opens to the arboreal splendor to the east of the small yard outside. If Dad was the arborist of the family, Grandpa had been the all-out tree-hugger. As Dad told it, Grandpa had not wanted to cut down any more trees than were absolutely necessary for the 36 x 36 footprint of the cabin. Only by persistent lobbying was Dad able to convince Grandpa to clear enough trees “for a little breathing space.” By 1939, the woods were thick, but they had not always been that way. Between 1890 and 1910, in the name of progress—and building cities downstream from Hayward, the nearest town from Grindstone Lake—lumberjacks, many of them from Sweden, had clear-cut much of the territory.
In the middle of the great room of the cabin, under a large, suspended wagon wheel bearing light fixtures rests a big round oak dining table surrounded by oak straight-back chairs. On this occasion, the table was set for 14 people—then our entire extended family of Nilssons. At the center was a big, birthday cake on which my mother had inscribed with icing, Happy Birthday Eric and Garrison.[3] The white wicks of a dozen or so candles awaited the long wooden match that in an hour or two would be the signal to sing as tradition required.
In the corner of the great room opposite the fireplace is the music place—an upright piano, tons of sheet music and copies of old Encore magazines neatly arranged on long, low shelving next to the piano. Hanging on the wall above the piano is a framed collection of portraits of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Wagner. When my sisters and I were kids, the faces of those composers were as familiar to us as were the pictures of Washington or Lincoln—or Ben Franklin—back at Franklin Elementary School in Anoka, Minnesota where we grew up and where my parents still called their main home.
Until recently, I never questioned the selection of composers in that collection of portraits above the cabin piano. Who could argue with inclusion of any of them? Only after reading about Wagner’s antisemitism and his unseemly treatment of Mendelssohn, did I recognize the irony in the placement of those two composers side-by-side. Dad, though, was able somehow to reconcile the works of Wagner, which Dad enjoyed thoroughly, and the music of Mendelssohn, which he also loved. But his favorite was Schubert.
On that day, sitting on the music rack of the piano was a book of Chopin Etudes—the latest music to have been played, possibly by Dad but probably by Mother, who, though not the accomplished perfectionist that Dad was, played more spontaneously than he. Dad approached the piano as if it were an exalted altar.
With the French doors open to the warmth of August, the doorway to the left of the music corner lead to the front porch. Out there stood Grandpa’s antique music stand. His remains were over 25 years in the ground, but his influence was still very much alive in the careers of my three sisters—each a professional violinist. Back in Minneapolis during the 1910s Grandpa played in the pit of movie theaters and ran a violin teaching school that flourished even during the depths of the Great Depression. Resting on his old music stand that day in August were Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin. Earlier in the day, any of my three sisters—or just as likely, all three of them, each at a separate time—had been practicing a movement or two from that music.[4]
But right then what filled the cabin was Jussi Björling singing Nessun Dorma. The violin cases—all three of them—were parked quietly on the front porch, lids open, bows and violins in repose.
An old, painted writing table still stands under the row of casement windows that allow a view of the short front yard, which gives way to the steep, pine-studded slope running down to the glistening lake. At the table sat Dad, alone in the cabin, dressed in his work jeans, plaid shirt, and wide, yellow suspenders in the design of measuring tapes. Inside the cover of a brand new, hardcover book, he inscribed the date and a birthday greeting to me. Despite his big hands, he possessed remarkable fine-motor skills. Like everything else he attempted, his penmanship was consistently perfect and beautiful. The tremor that would ruin his writing and halt his piano playing was still a few years off.
With a faint smile of satisfaction, Dad closed the book cover, returned the pen to its holder in the desk drawer, and slipped the book back into the paper bag marked “B. Dalton Bookstore[5].” The celebration would have its time and place. In the meantime, there was firewood to split. Before exiting the cabin, Dad put the CD speakers on the windowsill, facing out across the yard to the woodpile. He restarted the Jussi Björling CD and turned up the volume.
While Björling sang, Dad swung the splitting maul and stacked “sticks of firewood,” as he called them. Dad had designed, placed and constructed his wood racks to shelter large quantities of firewood from the effects of rain and snow. On those racks he stacked the wood as if he were assembling a puzzle made from pieces of fine china. But it wasn’t china. It was oak, maple and poplar from trees that he himself had cut from the surrounding acreage and hauled to the wood racks. He loved to touch wood and from its grain, divine information about the life of the tree from which it had been harvested. As the music played and Dad worked, he was as happy as he could be, as happy as he’d ever been. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[5] “B. Dalton” was a bookstore chain founded in 1966 by Bruce Dayton (giving the store his name in close approximation), grandson of the George Dayton, who, in turn, was the founder of The Dayton Company, a hugely successful, Minneapolis-based department store. After thriving for nearly two decades, the bookstore chain was acquired by Barnes & Noble. The brand was liquidated by January, 2010. For several years soon after she arrived in America, our grandmother worked as a cook’s assistant for the fabulously wealthy Dayton family. They had treated her very well, and she and Dad remained highly loyal to the Dayton brand.
