Eating Denmark: Part One

On a recent family-reunion vacation, my mother described her dream to me.

It was her mother's birthday and my mother had designed a beautiful chocolate cake in the shape of Denmark, the birthplace of my grandmother. The cake was laid out on a flat-mirrored platter and was detailed down to the last little isalnd floating on the reflective surface. The birthday celebration was to be head at one end of a large gymnasium surrounded by tiered levels of an arena. Before the event could get stared, two full basketball teams, complete with cheerleading squads swarmed down the aisles and onto the court bouncing their balls, running their warm-ups, and shaking their pom-poms. Mother, as she recounts the dream, said she was furious. She could feel her anger hot in her face, her hands clenched tightly along the edges of the mirrored cake platter. But everyone at the party -- relatives, long-time friends and aquaintances -- told her not to worry that everything would be all right. So they packed up the celebration and moved to a room upstairs away from the sweaty basketball teams and their adoring cheerleaders. Meanwhile, the cake slowly melted and my mother had to lick the drippings off the sides with her fingers.

“What does it mean?” I asked her when she’d finished recounting the dream.

“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” she sighed. “I’d have to look up all the symbolism in my dream books to really get down to all the layers.”

We were sitting at my aunt’s dining room table just outside of Sutton’s Bay, Michigan. My aunt, my mother’s older sister, was 87 at the time and the point of our visit was a female family reunion. The Jensen clan, my mother’s family, consisted of three daughters and three sons, but of the 17 grandchildren, 11 of them were girls all of whom agreed to gather mid-June in Michigan at the request of Edith, now the oldest matriarch of the family.

Growing up I was aware of my extended family, but not particularly close to any of them. My father’s side of the family is minimal compared with my mother’s and except for a few summer visits from cousins and our belligerent and hateful paternal grandfather, my father’s family was a mystery to me. My mother, on the other hand, always kept in contact with her sprawling cousins and their children, sitting down every Christmas to send detailed letters folded into holiday cards and mailing stacks of them off to all four corners of the globe.

Still, despite her diligence at maintaining the family tree, the names on the envelopes did not register faces in my memory.

If the Jensen clan is known for anything, they are known for their longevity. My mother, now 80 often outlasts me, her pace only slower recently because of a bum hip and swollen knees. Aunt Edith walks with a cane and bends slightly to the left with a bad back and recovery from a broken hip, but she can still challenge the likes of the Energizer bunny even under the influence of Vicadin.

Ten years ago an even larger extended clan met in Sutherland, Iowa birthplace of the Jensen children for the celebration of my Aunt Anna’s 90th birthday. In the basement of VFW halls and churches, long tables held the food I fondly remembered from my childhood – egg-yellow potato salad, Jello concoctions filled with fruit and marshmallows, and my personal favorite, cold slaw with just the right blend of tangy dressing. Stretched out on another table were huge displays of the various branches of the family tree. My grandfather, Christian, had three brothers and one sister each of whom appeared to be as prolific as my grandfather. During that reunion, I met more people who looked vaguely familiar if only because we shared the same high cheekbones or unusually broad shoulders. Inundated with names of relatives I didn’t quite know, I asked my mother to explain relationships by referring to one of the many family trees. It was during that vacation that I finally grasped the concept of second cousins twice removed though now I’m not certain I could explain it to anyone else.

Aunt Anna died at age 96, crippled with arthritis, almost completely blind, and uncertain of her surroundings at any given moment. My mother, 18 years younger, looked to Anna as more of a mother than a sister especially after their mother died when my mother was in her early 40’s. I, too, looked to Anna as more of a grandmother than an Aunt and therefore viewed my cousins as more of aunts than contemporaries.

I was 10 when my grandmother died, but I did not travel back from the state of Washington to Sutherland, Iowa to attend her funeral. In fact, I have very few memories of my grandmother though I do remember her straight, straight back, her powdery smell of lavender, her ice cream cakes, and the one time she let me undo her gray hair from its tight bun so I could comb it in the downstairs bathroom of our 17th Street house.

Traveling to Michigan to Aunt Edith’s brought many of the scattered pieces of my family tree together for me this time. No longer were relations just names branched out on butcher paper, but they were faces, some of whom I knew, some of whom I did not and stories, like stones in a river, each with their own unique patterns and weight, curves and textures.

We were called together, I learned in the middle of the trip, to hear the stories of both my Aunt and my mother. On one night, they were to tell the tale of my grandfather and grandmother’s life in Denmark, their meeting and marriage in Iowa, and the birth of their six children. While that night did occur, the stories flowed throughout the week and by the end, were repeated more than once to those of us who stayed the longest.

By the end of the week, I was exhausted by late nights and overlapping stories, by my energetic and demanding sister, and my equally forceful and demanding aunt. Many of the conversations that week were exercises in minutiae – details of minute-by-minute accounts describing the purchasing of a particular cereal or the recounting of a recent doctor’s visit. At first, all conversations were polite, the audience attentive, listeners locked in eye contact with the storyteller. By the end of the week, relatives stood up and ventured into the kitchen to choose from the abundance of snacks mid-story leaving the storyteller hanging on details they felt to be of the greatest import.

In other words, the beautiful cake of Denmark dripped at times, melting over the edges of even the best-laid plans. There was not much else to do, but lick the fingers of our mess and turn to each other and say, “Don’t worry, it will be all right.”