Forthcoming: Goodbye, Mom

My essay “Goodbye, Mom” is forthcoming. Here is an excerpt:

“I received your card in the mail just after Christmas. The envelope was covered in cute stickers and carefully chosen stamps. The blueberry stamp reminded me of one of our trips to Wisconsin when I was a child, when we picked berries by hand at a farm in Bayfield. Some of Brittany’s Finnish friends, who were living with us for the summer, came along on the trip. And, of course, you know that there are abundant bilberries in Finland, mustikka. We went cloudberry picking in a luscious and fragrant swamp when you visited me years ago in Ranua, after I finished my year at the folk high school there, sent by our church as part of their missionary work. Your great-grandparents almost certainly foraged for cloudberries and bilberries before they left Finland, Norway, and Åland for Minnesota and California.

The bright red pear stamps reminded me of the pear trees in our backyard, or your backyard. The ones between the apple trees and crabapple tree, the crabapple tree that grew so tall that we used Mike Olson’s tractor lift to pick the crabapples at the top. You would use your MehuMaija to turn the crabapples into juice and then turn the juice into crabapple jam during canning season. The raccoon and fox stamps were fitting for the rural Cokato landscape you raised me on, in the middle of fields and forest, where you moved from Plymouth as a teenager after marrying your husband, my father. Now and then we would see foxes darting across the grass and one time there was a raccoon in the culvert next to the crabapple tree where the skunks usually hid. You were so proud of us being the second family to live there, after you and dad bought the land from the Olsons. We never talked about the Dakota who lived there before 1862.

When I saw the envelope in our mailbox, I wondered if it was a Christmas card. There were no seasonal greetings on the outside, though, and you used to cover your Christmas card envelopes in winter-themed stickers. Snowmen, Christmas trees, angels. And I wasn’t expecting a Christmas card from you this year. You hadn’t responded to my last text message, when I let you know about reporting by ProPublica and Star Tribune on child sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth. I explained how there are many similarities with child sexual abuse within Conservative Laestadianism in North America and Finland. The weaponization of forgiveness, protection of predators, and dismissal of victims, who are pushed to forget.”