Gustaava and Sigrid by Mark Anderson

Around 1885 she walked away from the family farm in central Finland and worked her way down to Helsinki and finally to New York. She did volunteer work in a mission for Finnish merchant sailors at St. Peter's Lutheran church in Manhattan. There she met a 42-year old Finnish sea captain and they were married just after the turn of the century. He made a final voyage and brought some of his family carpenter tools from their island shipyard and farmstead. After selling his shares in the ship, he built her a big, brownstone house in the Finn colony of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. He continued building and she bore four children. Her name was Gustaava and she never learned much English. When the children reached school, they began speaking English and Gustaava would get help from an English-speaking neighbor when it was necessary to communicate with the public school officials. My sister named her daughter Taava after grandmother Gustaava. My aunt Sigrid died last year at the age of 92. She was very resentful of the way Gustaava required her (the eldest) to take on many household responsibilities. Aunt Sigrid also resented the way Gustaava nagged my grandfather. She would call him a fool from the western islands. Just a few months before Sigrid died, when I was visiting her in the nursing home one day, she told me that the night before she had heard her mother and father talking together in the next room as she was going to sleep. Sigrid looked at me with wonder and said that Gustaava was not scornful or nagging and was just carrying on a normal conversation with her husband. She didn't know if it was more of a miracle that she had heard them so clearly when they had, after all, been dead for at least fifty years, or that her mother was able to speak normally. "Oh, it was wonderful," she said. Sigrid had wanted to die for a long time, and she asked me why she couldn't. I told her that it was very important for her to tell me all the stories. After all, I was the youngest and couldn't remember my grandparents or how it had been in Brooklyn. So it seemed to me that maybe that was why she lived. When Sigrid died, someone said to me that now she would rejoin her husband. I knew at that moment that the first reunion was with Gustaava and that they would be at peace. Mark Anderson also has another other story in Mother Millennia titled, "Sallie".