Arctic Cotton

This is another one of my favorites – which I share with an excellent photographer i Kotzebue, Ak.

When Mom was a child, it was used as stuffing in pillows. It lasted a year, but apparently the pillows became very thin towards spring.

Grandpa’s Skates

I spent a week in my cousin’s cottage which is in the tiny village where our mothers were born. Grandpa and Grandma farmed the land from 1927 until Grandpa died 30 years later, but the place had been in the family from 1916. It was Grandma’s adoptive parents who started breaking ground there. The place is still in the family and I really hope I’ll be there to celebrate when it’s been “ours” for a hundred years. The place is nothing fancy, it is a crofters legacy that is slowly being reclaimed by the bush, since it hasn’t been farmed during the last 50 years. No matter – it has a very special place in my heart, since I’ve lived there both as a newborn and as a teenager.

I found these when I was poking around in one of the sheds on the property. I don’t remember seeing them before – they may very well have been nesting in some box or other secluded place – or they weren’t significant enough for me to remember from when I was a teenager…

That’s my Grandpa’s name, Johan Oskar Abramsson. A very sweet man who fathered 10 children and would lie down on the kitchen sofa with Grandma for a nap after the midday meal – every day right until his death at 67. I have fond memories of them both – Grandpa loved children and had a light heart, Grandma had a darker personality – possibly because she suffered from epilepsy and was always aware that the seizures could come any time. My middle name Helena was also my Grandma’s name and if I pulled all of my hair back into a bun, I’d look a lot like her.