Myrtine Petersen Grove July 16, 1891 - April 10, 1966

 

Myrtine 

I was not my grandmother’s favorite grandchild, but I adored both my grandparents. I was devastated when we lost my dear Grandma on April 10, Easter Sunday, 1966. 

I was a Junior in high school and heavily into the music of the day. I’d grown my hair long, cut bangs, grown them out again, and mimicked Joan Baez, Janis Ian and Judy Collins with my guitar. John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Hoyt Axton were my heroes, and I wasn’t the ingenue that my cousin Marci was. My grandmother often told me I should try to be more like her. I loved my grandmother too much to resent those comments and had no intention of ever being anyone but who I was.

Myrtine Petersen Grove, born July 16, 1891 in Colman, Moody, South Dakota, died on April 10, 1966 in Enumclaw, Washington, at home, sitting in a chair, eating her daughter’s canned peaches, put up in August of 1965, when it never occurred to anyone that Grandma wouldn’t be with us the next summer, pressing the lids on fruits and vegetables to test the seal, making sure there was fresh coffee perking, and cheese sandwiches drowning her dark Danish bread, while we all labored away in the hot kitchen, juggling jars, rings, lids and boiling water.

Married

My Beautiful Grandparents

My grandma’s bread was the best in the world, brown, with a hint of sweetness, rich, like her constant coffee, little slices that were often overwhelmed by layers of cheese, thinly sliced ham or beef, beet pickles and tart mustard. Her klejner and æbleskiver were not just holiday delicacies; they were warm in her kitchen on a regular basis, rolled in powdered or granulated sugar, greeting you at the back door, assuring your special place in her kitchen, which always smelled like a cross between a bakery and laundry, where the scent of her steam iron mixed with all the smells of a loving, well-tended home.

                                                 My precious grandmother and me

My Danish grandmother eschewed pants and wore delicate patterned and floral dresses of cotton, silk crepe and chiffon, even for daily wear. The scent of lilacs and lavender will always remind me of resting my cheek against her soft bosom, even as I grew into adolescence.

Grandpa Carl and Me and Grandma Myrt

Grandma, my mom, a Danish exchange student, Grandpa, Me

1964

Even though I was the little hippie girl, and my grandmother would often tell me to get my hair out of my eyes, she was one of my biggest fans when it came to my singing and reading out loud. I don’t know who loved it more, she or I, when I’d sit cross-legged on the floor and entertain her, while she crocheted her lacy patterns, the needle weaving in and out, her fingers moving with practiced precise movements that she’d perfected over several decades.

The night before Grandma passed, our family was at my grandparents, my mother making dinner, urging her mother to relax and get well, after a mini-stroke had hospitalized her the week before. I was in my usual spot in the living room in front of my grandmother, reading to her from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. My mother popped her head into the room to tell us dinner was soon ready, and Grandma told her to get the bust of Hans Christian Andersen down from the mantel. She wanted my mother to write my name on the bottom, to make sure I got it when she died. There was medical tape on the side table from when the doctor had been there earlier, taking a sample of my grandmother’s blood. My mother wrote Margo from Grandma Grove 4/9/66, and then went back to finish getting dinner on the table for my dad, grandparents, little brother and me. I suppose we protested a little, as people commonly do when someone wants to bequeath a treasure, but she’d promised it to me long before that night, so we didn’t go on about it, to my recollection.

The next morning, when my mother was in church playing the organ for the early Easter service, her mother went to be with her angels who’d gone on ahead of her. I'm sure they greeted her blowing trumpets, strumming harps and singing Broadway tunes like You Gotta Have Heart, from Them Damn Yankees, a musical my grandpa had taken Myrtine to see on one of their trips to New York. I suppose if that's where they are, I'll get to see her again one day. If that's where I'll go. 

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