Nils from "The Ghosts of Mystic Hills Cemetery"

           Nettie struggled mightily when Emily died. We had worked so hard to get pregnant and been so careful during pregnancy, that when she was born sickly our disappointment was unfathomable. We were numb as frail Emily faded and departed from us. In my own depression, Nettie’s grief was impenetrable to me. As the months passed we settled into a protective routine that enabled me to fulfill my teaching responsibilities with competence but without joy. Nettie and I were in no way hostile to each other, nor were either of us craving anything more from each other. We were both so withdrawn that I had no idea what she did each day except keep the house immaculate and prepare perfectly balanced meals. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, much less feeling. She never approached me for any opening either.

Deep inside I knew that I loved Nettie and avoided probing her isolation for fear of destroying what was left of our relationship. I was resolved to be content to go on this way indefinitely rather than risk having her disappear entirely. I treasured the two kisses I received every day, one she gave me on the cheek as I left for school in the morning and one I gave her on the cheek before we fell asleep every night. Yes, we slept in the same bed, but the space between those two solitary, scheduled physical contacts every day those seemed immense to me.

Between getting up for school Monday through Friday and going to church together as we always had on Sunday, Saturday was our only opportunity to sleep in. Depression is exhausting. Sleep was more an escape than refreshment. One Saturday morning I woke late as usual and headed for a solitary breakfast. While the coffee was perking I heard myself singing Robert Lowry’s My Life Flows On. I must have been singing loudly enough that Nettie heard me and came into the kitchen smiling at me for the first time since before Emily was born. She said nothing, but poured her own cup of coffee and kept smiling at me.

“Would you like me to fry some bacon and eggs for us?” she asked. “I’ll dice some potatoes to go with them if you’d like.”

“Certainly,” I must have smiled back at her. “That would be lovely.”

Though I couldn’t remember all of the words, I couldn’t stop from mingling humming and mumbling the song, and Nettie hummed and mumbled along at the stove. Though we still didn’t get all of the words to all of the verses, we soon pieced together the words to the driving rhythm of the refrain and were singing together boisterously. “No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love is Lord of heav’n and earth, how can I keep from singing?” When we realize we were both humming in unison with our mouths full of food we laughed with simultaneous spontaneity.

By the time I cleared the table and washed the dishes Nettie had dressed and returned to the kitchen. As I stood up from hanging the dishcloth on the rack under the sink, Nettie was right there to kiss me on the lips and put her arms around me for the first time since Emily had been born. Instead of retiring to my desk and books, I got out my long idle guitar again, found the song in a hymnal and started to play. I hadn’t played the guitar since Emily had been born, and tuning it took me quite a while. The calluses on my fingers had softened and pressing the strings against the frets stung. But in twenty minutes or so I was singing all of the words to all of the verses and feeling their soothing assurance.

Nettie didn’t join me or even appear at the doorway to listen, and I wasn’t singing for her to hear, yet in retrospect, I believe that song marked a turning point for me and for our marriage. On Monday morning, I woke well ahead of the alarm and left the house at least fifteen minutes earlier than usual with energy and anticipation for a new day and a new week of teaching. I didn’t decide to sing that Saturday morning. I didn’t pick that song because I thought it would be therapeutic. I just discovered that I was singing it without thinking about it.

Once we found our new life together, Nettie would talk about being given images of promising social relationships, especially romantic relationships. Though I never said it exactly this way, I think what she went through after Emily’s death gave her an acute awareness of social cues that she pieced together to make her pictures. I felt like My Life Flows On was given to me at just the right moment that somehow coordinated with how Nettie was progressing. Of course, I did know the song and can explain that it rose up out of my subconscious memory because I was ready to make the turn out of darkness into a new light. Perhaps, but I did not choose it because I thought it made sense. It became the most significant landmark on my life journey of its own volition or prompted by some unseen intelligence.

Nettie and I have both grown up with Christian faith. Until Emily’s death, we accepted and lived by that faith, perhaps presumptuously but sincerely. As had been our habit from birth, we went to church every Sunday. I can’t say that it sustained me emotionally or spiritually beyond marking the turn of a new week. I can’t really speak for Nettie as we communicated so little during that time, but I know that I never questioned that God was with me as I walked through the valley of the shadow of death. I felt that God was experiencing the darkness as intensely as I was, and I did not think I’d ever get out of that darkness. But I woke up singing one random Saturday morning.

Within a couple of months I was awake and alert well ahead of 6:00 am and thought I might enjoy breakfast at Steinbergs’ Deli and Diner. The first morning I took my personal copy of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and a new composition book and new pen. At Steinbergs’ I went to the booth in the back corner by the window and ordered baked Irish oatmeal with chopped nuts and a cup of coffee. I asked the waitress if I could stay for an hour even if I had finished my breakfast. She chuckled and said, “As long as you tip better than the farmers, you can stay as long as you like.” I thanked her with a smile, and she poured me a cup of coffee.

I sipped and read for a bit, jotting seemingly random thoughts in my notebook. Since I was already familiar with the story, I tried to compare our grief to Henry Fleming’s pursuit of authentic courage. That line of thought didn’t go anywhere. What is real grief as distinct from self-pity or depression? What’s the point of figuring it out? By the time the waitress brought my oatmeal, I had concluded that such reflection was pointless narcissism, and I’d be better heading in a different direction, but I wasn’t sure what it could be. Maybe I’d do better bringing a poetry anthology for breakfast reading. I set all that aside and just enjoyed the oatmeal’s texture: dense and chewy underneath the crispy baked crust, with richness enhanced by real cream. At home we just cooked oatmeal in a pot and served it soft with milk. After I finished my breakfast, I went back to reading, purposely avoiding any effort to view it through my current experience, content to let it humanize the recitation of Civil War history that I knew was coming later in the day.

On returning home that evening, I couldn’t wait to tell Nettie about one student who had read The Red Badge of Courage in her American Lit class and wondered how accurately it presented the facts of the Civil War. She asked if I thought Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg was courage or foolishness. Of course, I turned it into a class discussion, which was vigorous and not only drew out the well prepared students, but seemed to motivate the others to go back and reread the history textbook, not as assigned homework but to sort out their own questions. I wasn’t just doing my job teaching history, I was joyfully educating students.

Little by little Nettie began telling me her observations about social relationships. They hadn’t yet formed into the images that would become so important to her, but her joy grew when she saw people connect with each other. Housekeeping errands became opportunities for conversations with fellow shoppers and clerks at the grocery, tellers at the bank and most of all the women of the church with whom was reconnecting by attending the women’s fellowship again after dropping out during her pregnancy. We were having conversation with each other again. Our interest in each other’s lives was reawakening.

Now the routine pre-sleep kiss seemed to trigger a few minutes of conversation to wrap up the day. Then one night, Nettie kissed me back, right on the lips and put her arm around my shoulder. She pressed her hips up against me and guided my hand inside her unbuttoned nightgown. And so resumed our marital intimacy. But it was nothing like it had been when we were working so hard to conceive a child, or even what it had been when we first married. Freedom, joy – yes, pleasure – but above all love!

Starting with the Norton Anthology of English Literature, I experimented with different kinds of reading and writing during my breakfasts at Steinbergs’. In a few months I jettisoned all of the efforts that seemed too much like work and read whatever I was enjoying at the time. I gave up trying to make my notes into essays and just let them be snatches of things that flitted through my mind. In time, I found that themes emerged on their own without trying to figure them out. When I recognized one of these themes, I felt that a light was illuminating a dark corner of my mind that I hadn’t even known was there before. They didn’t seem to be particularly profound, but did enrich a serendipitous delight, usually with something simple and ordinary.

That back booth in the corner by the window became my own territory. Wanda the waitress whispered to me one day that she’d make sure it was always open for me if I got there before 6:15 am. That part was no problem as I was usually waiting for a couple of minutes before she unlocked the door at 6:00 am. All of the regulars had their places anyway. The farmers gathered at the tables close to the front door, rearranging them as their group evolved through the morning.  Working farmers came in when chores were done and left to start the day’s labor. This varied with the kind of farm and the season of the year. There really are no retired farmers, only those whose sons or sons-in-law were running the farms or had sold to a corporation. They staked out their places at the center tables and stayed longer than I did.

An ever changing collection of truck drivers gravitated to the booths near the men’s room. Through the morning state patrols, county sheriffs and town constables took turns in the booths closest to the door where they could look out the window at their patrol cars. No one ever seemed interested in my rear booth in the corner by the window. Though a lot of people came and went through the morning, at least a couple of booths and tables were always available. I always left for school a little after 7:00 am, so I really don’t know what happened later in the morning, but I suspect it was an extension of what I observed during my hour, but thinning out by 8:00 am.

The working farmers, especially those whose children were my students, greeted me on arrival with a wave and a respectful address. Otherwise, everyone else ignored me where I sat back in my corner, which suited me just fine. I came to relish and treasure this solitude. Though it had nothing to do with preparing for my school day, I did feel much more ready for the students than I ever had before.

One morning about the time we knew we were expecting a baby but before we were ready to say anything, Olaf Gustafson walked in and invited himself into the tables with the farmers. They received him cordially, even though I had heard the small family farmers were suspicious of his position as senior manager of Cloverland Dairy. Among themselves the family dairy farmers saw Cloverland Dairy as a corporate agriculture threat to their way of life. Olaf clearly knew their lingo and was at least as knowledgeable about all of their usual topics of conversation, but he didn’t contribute much. He just appeared glad to be there. None of them seemed to question why he could suddenly join them for breakfast. When Wanda came by to refill my coffee cup, she nodded toward Olaf and said, “He’s been a lunch regular for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve seen him at breakfast.”

After several weeks, no, it must have been a few months because Hans had been born by then, Olaf waved his usual, “Good Morning, Nils,” and seemed reluctant to sit with the farmers. I gestured to the seat across from me and said, “Would you care to join me?” He hesitated a moment but accepted my invitation. As a child growing up in the Lutheran Church I remembered Olaf as one of the big kids who faded after confirmation and vanished after finishing high school.

I didn’t try to sort out if I thought I was reading Olaf or reading myself into him, but I said, “I can tell you’re in the middle of a significant change. Ever since your high school days, you were the cow guy and just about lived at Cloverland Dairy.  I noticed you were having breakfast here every day, and Wanda told me you’d also been having lunch here for quite a while. I don’t want to pry, but I suspect eating at Steinbergs’ morning and noon means something.” And so began a partnership through our transitions that quickly became a close if unlikely friendship.

I made a major effort to focus the conversation on Olaf that day, but I did tell him that after having come to terms with not having children, to have a new baby in the house was an adjustment. He just laughed and went on with his own musings as he tried to sort out how to interpret Cloverland Dairy making him their community “cow expert” and turning over the operation of the dairy to men he had trained. He enjoyed the students in the 4-H Club but couldn’t see that drew it on his years of dairying. A little past seven o’clock I excused myself saying I liked to be at school well ahead of the noise of the day. Olaf sighed, “Good for you. Not needing to be at the dairy before everyone else just feels empty to me right now.” I nodded as I got up, left my tip and headed off to school.

That evening I wrote a thank you note to give to Olaf in case he sat in my booth again in the morning. He was definitely in unfamiliar territory talking about his personal misgivings, especially given the casual nature of our relationship that had really been non-existent since being young at the Lutheran Church. I wanted him to know I appreciated the trust he put in me. I wanted him to know I personally valued our conversation. I wanted to open a door to friendship without intimidating him. Olaf read my note silently. I think I even noticed a bit of a blush when he said, “Thanks, Nils. I’d be pleased for you to be my friend.”

Though we each needed someone to accompany us on our transitions, I didn’t want to get so heavy we’d be like psychiatrists for each other. So the next day I asked him about his favorite cows, and he asked me about my favorite students. We were groping a bit to find some common ground on which to build a friendship. Some of my uncertainties came out as I talked about students, but I didn’t feel ready to approach my real uncertainty – becoming a parent for the first time, really, at a rather advanced age for that – not yet anyway. I don’t think I lacked trust in Olaf. Rather, I didn’t want to scare him off, as I knew I needed him at least as much as he needed our new friendship.

One morning, after informal chit-chat about my students who were also 4-H Club members, Olaf hesitated before saying, “Do you remember how you told me that by being with the kids at the 4-H Club I might learn how to talk to people as well as I talked to cows?”

I chuckled a bit, “I’m sure I meant it as a joke, a little humor to lighten up the mood.”

“Well,” Olaf chuckled too, “4-H Club may be where I realize I am learning to talk to people, but I think I’m actually learning it during our breakfast conversations. Talking to the cows was emotional, at least for the cows. I wanted to help them feel relaxed because they knew I liked them and they could trust me. For me, talking to people was always practical. I gave instructions at the dairy. I assigned my children their chores and told them how to run their lives. Of course, I told them I loved them and meant it, yet I myself didn’t know what that meant. I thought I knew what love was when I told Sigrid I loved her, but even that was about how well we work together, what a great team we are. But when I told her how I felt about something, it was an opinion not an emotion. I don’t think I was actually aware of having emotions until Cloverland Dairy moved me from manager to community cow expert. I felt honor and rejection, accomplishment and disappointment all mixed up together, but I didn’t know how to talk about any of that, until we started having breakfast together.”

“If our breakfast talks have helped you, I am glad, but you have to know that I’ve been working on my own emotions at the same time.” I paused to let Olaf ponder that a moment. I also pondered if this was a suitable opportunity for me to be more open about my emotions.

Then Olaf said, “As I’ve been learning to talk to people, I’ve been learning that listening to them is even more important. It’s a little more complicated than listening to the cows, but maybe not all that different. Over the years I learned the meaning of the different sounds cows make. Just like people, each one has her own vocabulary, but they are still speaking cow, so I’m sure they understand each other. If people would pay attention, they could understand the cows too. A couple weeks ago one of the older boys who is raising a calf stayed after the meeting to ask me for advice about how to keep his calf happy. I talked non-stop for at least five minutes, probably more like ten, and he interrupted me. ‘Mr. Gustafson, I think I’ve heard your speech a few times in the 4-H Club meetings. It’s very good, but I want you to listen to what worries me about my own calf.’ Well, listen I did, for almost an hour. And he went home happy!”

“Sound’s great, Olaf,” I said with a smile.

Before I could think of what to add, he went on, “You know, Nils, I’ve done almost all of the talking at our breakfasts, and you’ve done the listening. Something started nagging at me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. Then from what was lost in the debris of my mind, I remembered that you had said something about adjusting to becoming a first time parent at an advanced age. I don’t know if I was so self-centered I didn’t care that you were struggling too, or if I just hadn’t learned to listen yet, but I blew right past your comment without consciously noticing it. I’m kind of awkward at this, but I’ll try to listen if you want to talk.”

I’m sure I must have gasped or flushed or something but I managed to say, “Thank you, Olaf. … I think listening to you has actually helped me work through my realization of what being a new father means. … And, I want you to know for sure that I haven’t been wondering when you were going to listen to me. … I have to admit that I’m a little awkward talking about my interior life too, and I’ve wondered if our places had been reversed if I would have trusted me as you have done.”

“Talking to you has actually been easy.” Olaf nodded and shrugged. “I didn’t have to think too much about it or decide what I would or wouldn’t tell you. When I said something that surprised me and you didn’t flinch, the next thing just came tumbling out. Before I knew it I had told you things I don’t think I was even aware of myself. Though once I said them out loud, I realized how true and important they were. I don’t know what counselors do to get people to talk, but you could give them lessons.”

I laughed and shook my head. “Thanks, but I wasn’t consciously doing anything to get you to talk. I just let you do it. You never said anything I thought was shocking. You were just being human in your own way. You know, before you moved over to my booth from the farmers’ tables, I sat here and read books and made little notes to myself. I didn’t read anything that had to do with teaching history or geography. I read things I enjoyed and put me in a relaxed but alert frame of mind before the school day. Sometimes I read a favorite novel, but I found poetry and short stories worked better since I could get to the end before I finished breakfast and went to school.”

“And you gave that up to listen to me?” Olaf grimaced.

“I don’t feel like I gave up anything,” I replied. “I traded a conversation in my head with remote friends for lively conversation with a face to face friend. My emotions about becoming a father were not the same as yours about getting pushed out of the dairy into a more public arena, but as I listened to you talk about your adjustments, I began to identify ways I was making my adjustments, and I was encouraged that since you were making it, I would too.”

“I wasn’t thinking of myself as a helper, more as a helpee.” Olaf was blushing a little now. “When I realized I had been doing most of the talking while you were doing most of the listening, I felt some remorse about having been selfish. Now you tell me I was a help to you, so I don’t need to feel guilty about being selfish. … By just saying that, I feel relieved.”

I smiled and nodded. “One of the things I’ve realized is that I’ll be retiring about the same time Hans gets out of college.  That didn’t so much make me feel old as it reminded me to take advantage of those years, especially now while I’m not so old. I’m not much of an athlete, and I’m sure he’s not going to be interested in my academic career for many years. So I’ve concluded I can try to connect with him through music.”

“I don’t think I could have tried that,” Olaf chuckled, “but I could have given my children more than the sensible advice I dropped on them. They probably thought they were getting Dad’s life lectures at supper every night. They were always about hard work, duty and discipline, responsibility and reputation. I don’t know if any of them would have been interested in the dairy business, but they all seemed to want to get away from the farm and farm community. I fell in love with cows working alongside my Dad. That’s how I learned to talk to the cows. But Cloverland Dairy didn’t seem a good place for children, too big, too dangerous. Of course, my Dad didn’t like me working for Cloverland Dairy either, too modern, too impersonal. So though their ancestors did dairy as long as anybody can remember, none of my children wanted any part of it.”

“Are you disappointed?” I asked.

“Not really,” Olaf answered. “They have their own satisfying lives, and Cloverland wasn’t their family’s farm. When I went to Cloverland, I guess I broke with my Dad and the family farm, even though I was still a dairyman. I knew Dad didn’t like it, but I didn’t pay any attention to whether he was disappointed. I just thought he was stuck in the old ways, and I wanted to be up to date.”

“I certainly have no expectations that Hans will become a history teacher, or any kind of teacher for that matter. But I have been thinking about what Hans will be looking back to and thinking he got from Nettie and me. Music isn’t just notes and words. Music fuses thoughts and emotions. I’ve never been one to talk all that much about what goes on deep inside of me. I don’t mean just what I think about but how I engage with what I think about. To try to talk about that the same way I give a history lecture or lead a class discussion would come out all garbled. Reading fiction and poetry helps me connect with how other people have gone through these things, though I could never write it myself. It would come out like a history lecture, describing the emotions but not expressing them. But music … ah music! Singing and playing my guitar lets what’s going on inside get out in ways that both satisfy me and convey something to others. It’s not my wonderful voice or instrumental prowess. It’s sharing an experience by resonating together, even if the frequencies are not exactly the same.” Realizing I had just spilled a torrent of words, I took a deep breath.

“You at least are aware of what’s going on inside of you so you can match it to music to communicate it to others.” Olaf was leaning forward in the booth and speaking with a stage whisper. “By talking to you I’ve discovered things that were going on in me that I was completely unaware of before now.”

“Sometimes I get surprised too.” I said. “After our little girl Emily died, Nettie and I went through a long dark time. We buried more than our baby in Mystic Hills Cemetery. We buried our marriage. We buried our future. Before we buried Emily there, I could walk around the cemetery as a fascinated historian. I knew the contributions and conflicts of the people buried there. Especially in the generations ahead of ours, I was aware of families who lost several children before adulthood. Families who didn’t lose at least one child were rare. Sometimes too, there were gravestones of two wives for the same man who died at the same time as an infant. I always found those grave markers to be poignant. But after burying Emily, I asked myself how they managed to keep going. I admired their courage.

“Then one Saturday morning, I got up and was rummaging around in the kitchen, and I heard myself singing a song by Robert Lowry called My Life Flows On. I knew the song, but I didn’t know why I was singing it, but I was loud enough that Nettie came out and sang it with me. Except we really couldn’t remember the words, even putting the pieces together, except for the refrain which goes, ‘No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love is Lord of heav’n and earth, how can I keep from singing?’ Later I got out a hymnal and my guitar and sang all of the words over and over again. In one way, I felt like that song rose up from deep below my conscious awareness, and in another way, the song seemed to come from somewhere far beyond me. It was like a message sent to me from very far away. By singing that song, Nettie and I connected again, and before long we started making love again, but it was a very long time before Hans was born.”

“Weren’t you hoping for another child as soon as possible?” Olaf asked.

“Not really,” I said. “When our relationship was reborn, we let go of all of those hopes. Nettie began to find her place as a sort of social engineer, which I helped. And I discovered a delight in teaching that was new and exhilarating for me. So when we got pregnant after having given up on that, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Hans has changed our life. We can’t just jump in on every social event that Nettie dreams up. That’s alright but an adjustment after being so free for such a long time. I know Hans is still quite young, but he is starting to respond to us, and I am amazed. I love getting out my guitar and singing to him before he goes to bed at night. I love singing My Life Flows On to him, and I wonder how he’ll respond to it as he gets older, and if I should tell him the story, or if I should cut back on singing it so often. We weren’t singing it when Hans was conceived, but without it he might not have been. Since we had let go of having children, we have no idea exactly when he was conceived. Maybe by the time he goes to school or becomes a teenager, he won’t want to hear me sing that song at all.”

“Sigrid and I enjoy our love life, but I’ve never talked about it the way you just described your relationship with Nettie.” Olaf was blushing. “We don’t talk to each other about it either. We just go ahead and enjoy however it comes along.”

“I wasn’t intending to start some sort of locker-room guy talk, bragging on our conquests.” Now I was using the stage whisper. “For me, the song was what revived our marriage, not sex. The sex came along later, not much later, but as a result not a cause of the corner we turned together. And Hans was a surprise who came quite a bit later. I think we are both discovering that life doesn’t stand still but keeps on moving, and we do better when we move with it.”

“I guess I’m moving from the talking-to-cows stage of life to talking-to-people stage of life. Helping the 4-H Club kids is like the laboratory where I practice what I’m learning. But my lessons have been coming from our breakfasts together. Before that, I struggled without seeing much progress. Maybe I’ve been learning to listen from the way you listen to me, even without thinking about it. For sure, as I’ve gotten better at listening, I’ve gotten a lot better at talking to people and may even be starting to enjoy this stage of life that I resisted for quite a while.” Olaf paused and smiled with satisfaction.

When he didn’t resume speaking, I added my reflections. “Do you remember the end of the Gloria Patri we sang in church, ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end’?”

“Yeah, of course,” Olaf shrugged his answer. “I can’t say it made much sense to me or that I tried to figure it out. It was just one of those every Sunday church things. That’s not why I dropped out though.”

I chuckled a little, but I wasn’t going to pursue why Olaf dropped out of church and I didn’t. “Since it came after singing glory to God the Father, Son and Spirit, I figured it meant God doesn’t change no matter how much the world changes. But as I’ve studied history and taught history, I realize that nothing stays the same from the beginning to the end of the world. Everything is always changing. I suppose some people find it comforting to think that when changes push them into something new that is uncomfortable, God doesn’t change. Somehow, I find that thinking that God keeps up with the changes in the world to be more comforting, but I don’t want to get into speculating about something we can’t know or just play word games with. I doubt this is what the Gloria Patri is getting at, but as a historian, I realize that from the beginning to the end of the world, we are always moving from one stage to another. Everything grows out of something. Nothing arises in a vacuum, but we cannot pick a perfect time and freeze the film there. It keeps moving, whether we like it or not.”

Olaf hesitated. “I don’t want to talk about church or religion or even God. Those are not happy topics for me.”

“That’s not where I was intending to go, “I said. “I was thinking about how both of us are aware we are making major life transitions and can’t see what lies ahead of us very well. I certainly don’t want to make you uncomfortable. That line from the Gloria Patri provokes those thoughts in me, and I guessed you would remember it.”

“Oh, I remember it alright!” Olaf was squirming on his side of the booth.

“Since we found out we were expecting Hans, the transitions of history became very personal for me. I realized that Nettie and I will be older than the parents of most of his friends, especially once he starts school. I started thinking about how much of my life is already behind me and how limited the time ahead of me is. I don’t feel afraid or even sad about this. Knowing that I am a passing guest on the earth, in the passing of human generations, puts my life in perspective, into context. I have received a great wealth from those who came before me, and I want to leave something worthwhile behind. Supposedly Bernard of Chartres said we stand on the shoulders of giants. I’m certainly not a giant, but I’d like to think my shoulders have some stability, some elevation for someone to stand on and see a little farther because of it.”

“That’s quite an ambition,” Olaf sighed. “As much as I struggled with my father about family dairying and modern dairying, the only reason I only wanted to be the best dairyman I could was something I caught from my father. He’s the one who taught me how to talk to the cows, and what a difference it made if you did talk to them. I’m not a giant either, but I suppose Bert is standing on my shoulders as he manages Cloverland Dairy in a new generation of expansion.”

“And you’re offering your shoulders to those kids in the 4-H Club, not just what they learn about dairy or other aspects of agriculture. They are learning from you how to receive and impart respect. They are learning your work ethic and the value of behind the scenes providing what others need, even when they are unaware of where it came from and how it got to them before they bought it at the grocery store.” I could hear the energy in my own words.

“Of course, that’s what you’re doing with your students every day.” Olaf returned the affirmation.

“Yes, that’s what has kept me in teaching, even through that dark time after Emily died.” I felt a cloud slow my words down. “Every school year is different. Seniors graduate. In a town like Mystic Hills, I have continued to have contact and even personal relationships with many of them. Every year some drop out before graduating. A sad story lies behind the drop outs: death of a parent, unwelcome pregnancy, serious illness for the student or in their family, loss of a job by a parent, trouble with the law. And every year new students come. Most of them are freshmen from the junior high school, but more and more are transferring in from schools in the city or even from out of state. Mystic Hills is growing and changing. It is in transition from a small town farming community, and now looks like it will be swallowed up by the city.”

“Families move to Mystic Hills because they like the small town atmosphere conveniently accessible to the city. We welcome them. They boost the local economy. And they inevitably change the nature of the community. Before too long, Mystic Hills will not have the qualities that attracted them in the first place.” Olaf sighed and smiled simultaneously.

“Yes, many move to Mystic Hills in pursuit of nostalgia for the idealized way they wanted things to be, and in the process they force the community into a new future.” I tried to make sure my voice sounded positive. “While such nostalgia is an illusion that never actually existed, the new folk are remaking Mystic Hills into something our ancestors could never have imagined, and we can barely see ourselves. The movement is inevitable. Trying to freeze the town at a specific point in time only leads to disappointment and poor planning. Much better to anticipate what is coming and plan for it.”

“Don’t you think the tension between nostalgia and anticipation fuels political conflicts at every level?” Olaf shifted gears.

“Of course, as an historian, I see that in every era and every society.” I didn’t want to get drawn into political questions any more than Olaf wanted to get into religious questions. “But you and I are going through the same thing personally. We can’t stop life to stay in one place. Hans is a baby now. Before long he will walk and talk and go to kindergarten and graduate from high school. Of course I’d like him to go to college because it meant so much to me. But he’ll have to decide that and a myriad of other things over which I will have no real control.”

“That is for sure,” Olaf jumped in. “Just like my father couldn’t stop me from going to Cloverland Dairy, I couldn’t keep my kids in farming. Not to bring up religion again, but I still haven’t figured out what got Olga to go back to church right after Mom died. The funeral, of course, but Sunday worship? And she not only kept going but married the preacher. But I’m not going to try to talk to her about her transitions, especially now that she’s had a baby who will have to grow up being a preacher’s kid.”

I laughed a little. “You know, when Olga showed up in church after your Mom’s funeral, Nettie told me she had a vision of some kind of her and Rev. Swenson happy together. I told her to back off, but when she kept coming, she invited them both for dinner after church one Sunday. After that, they didn’t seem to waste any time building a romance, getting married and having a baby. I hope Nettie is right that they are happy.”

Olaf laughed too. “Olga is as happy as I’ve ever seen her. We are far enough apart in age that I don’t know much of what she was like as a child, but she totally devoted herself to taking the best possible care of our parents to their last days. Still, having a preacher in the family seems very strange. He seems comfortable with us when the family gets together, and we’re getting more comfortable with him. I suppose that’s part of my transition too.”

“You certainly can’t do anything about it,” I offered. “Despite Nettie’s prompting, Olga and Harold have made their own choice. Your choice is to adjust. After the care Olga gave your parents, you wouldn’t want to force her into perpetual loneliness, not that marriage is the only antidote to loneliness.”

“Of course not,” Olaf acknowledged. “I am just awfully awkward at having conversation with them. Maybe learning to talk with them would be like a graduate degree in learning to talk to people. I’ve still got a long way to go with the kids at the 4-H Club. Learning to talk comfortably to Olga and Harold is going to take some time.”

I laughed again. “You certainly seem comfortable talking to me, and I’m one of Harold’s every Sunday parishioners.”

Olaf laughed too. “I guess you’re right. I never thought about that. The Gloria Patri is about as close to religion as you’ve come in our talks.”

I chuckled. “My Life Flows On is a hymn, you know.”

“Really?” Olaf exclaimed. “The part you sang just sounds like a folk song. You know, with guitar, not something for an organ.”

“Sure does,” I affirmed. “Maybe it came to me because I can sing it with my guitar. Maybe it came to me to remind me that my life is always flowing on, just like everyone’s life.”