All I have of Anna

I never met the lady. She died long before I was born. The little I did know about my grandmother I mostly learn form my Aunt Hilma or other old timers in the area. I heard she was a beautiful woman. A tiny sweet natured thing with jet black hair and eyes. And would bake half a dozen loves of bread a day to feed her family. But going through the old house last fall, I found a trace of who she was, to tie in with the legends I had heard.

Anna was sold as a child to become an indentured servant to a prosperous family in Finland. When the wealthy family decided to immigrate to America, they brought along Anna, then age thirteen, in place of their own daughter who did not want to leave. It took Anna six months aboard a boat with little food to eat before reaching Ellis Island and later settling on the Iron Range of Minnesota. Later she met and married my scroundrel of a Grandfather and became the mother of nine homesteading a section of land in northern Minnesota.

When her rich "adopted" family died, they left Anna their house and land on the Iron Range. Anna, at the time was too poor to pay the inheritance taxes on the estate and it auctioned off. Had my grandparents sold their own homestead to pay the taxes they would of owned the richest mine in the state. Anna was never meant for material wealth.

All I found in the seldom used leather bound Bible was her obituary. A letter in Finish from her motherland. And a strange glass picture of a woman and a child. And a dried lady slipper my sister and I picked and hid in the Bible years ago when we were younger than my boys now. The obituary gave me her maiden name. The town she originated from in the obituary does not appear on any map. I cannot understand the letter. I hope the blurry image is Anna and her mother.

I keep the yellowed newspaper clipping here by my computer and look at it every day. I decided this spring the boys and my Sis and I will be going on a reindeer safari across the Arctic circle this summer. Being dark featured my guess is that Anna was of the gypsy indiginous Sami origin. But that too is at this point only a guess. It will only take us twenty five hours in the air, as opposed to six months by boat, plus over land by ox cart time, and our belly's will be full. When we go to sleep at the Palace Linna, I will wonder if she had seen the castle as she sailed away from her home. And you know for sure I will think of her often when we stay in the much more modest Hotel Anna. And eat some bread.