“The feeling of not being needed in this new society, or forgotten by the ones we love is uppermost in our minds. Perhaps they do believe they care, but there is no longer time for the closeness and love in the frantic scramble to survive with the most money and possession in the world of today. They miss so much, as we—who are older and remember those close family ties can only sit quietly by, watching the young ones whizz by to their doom—and their loneliness in the years ahead.”
-Excerpt from essay Loneliness and Depression by Elsie Jestila Roehl
In my mother’s family, silence was a tradition. It was difficult to get information about people, family history, or even how we felt about each other. Instead of talking, my mother spoke to me primarily through her making. Proficient with sewing, macramé, crochet and knitting, under her tutelage I learned to hand sew as a young girl. Later, when I was a teenager, she taught me to knit and crochet. Her hands were seldom still, and she was always tinkering with her own patterns.
When our relationship strained, textiles were a connection point between us. The two dolls that she made me when I was three years old now sit on a bookshelf, though their original clothes have long gone missing. The afghan that she made that covered me when I was home sick from school is folded in my linen closet all these years later. When she was absent, her work comforted me.
A younger version of myself with the dolls.
My mother died in 1999 at an early age, and in my grief, I launched into genealogy. My quest for answers to questions that I hadn’t even been aware of began.
In 2010, I visited my aunt in Arizona with my husband. I brought family photos with me for her to identify the people in them. We spent much of our visits reminiscing about my mother, while so many questions stirred inside me without the words to ask them. Near the end of our visit, my aunt showed me a framed cross-stitched needlework sampler she had on the wall and told me her grandmother, Maria Sophia, had made it. She was so proud of the sampler, and I was shocked that I had never seen it before. I snapped a quick cell phone picture of it and could not take my eyes off it. I had been studying early samplers in art school and here was an existent piece from my own family and proof of another generation of makers.
Maria Sophia and her husband, Magnus
I thought about that sampler a lot off and on over the years. It didn’t pass to me when my aunt died. When my local weaving guild study group made a proposal to use Swedish linen yarn for a project, I knew what my own project would be. If I could not have the original sampler, I could recreate one of my own. Using the photo, I mapped out the design, simplifying where I could not articulate the stitches due to the photo quality. The design was done in counted cross stitch and it was often challenging to get the count correct between the photo and the actual work. My woven linen cloth brought a sense of devotion to the project – I had a lot of time to think about Maria and what little I knew about her and her life. But I felt such a strong bond with her that I thought she would understand my intentions.
My great grandmother Maria Sophia’s Sampler photographed left and my recreated version on the right.
I turned to my genealogy research to help understand the sampler. Maria Sophia, my great grandmother, stitched the sampler in 1880. She was twelve at the time and living with her family in Sweden. The sampler features an alphabet and numbers one through zero at the top. Below are the initials of her father and mother under a crown like design, an arrow or berry/flower motif separates the parent’s initials. Near the center of the work are a chalice and cross, and two churches with gardens. At the center bottom prominently in tan are Maria’s initials MSA with the S stitched backwards. I find it fascinating that she did this since the S in the alphabet is correctly positioned. After much consideration, I chose to render the S in her name as she had, backwards. Flanked on either side of her initials are two sets of initials for her siblings that were alive at the time the work was completed. A few motifs frame out the composition and the whole work is framed with a maroon zig zag.
In her eighties my grandmother, Elsie, took creative writing classes at a local community center. She published some of her essays and poetry in her local newspaper and slowly shared them with me. Elsie was largely a mystery. She would tuck her stories about her life, raising her children and some of her longings, into an envelope and mail them with short letters to me. The letters contained brief sketches of her day or her worries about my mom, and little else. Through her writings, though, I got a glimpse of her inner life. I felt I didn’t write back often enough, but even when I did my inquiries about our family largely went unanswered. I spent a lot of my time quietly writing my own stories and poems. I did not share them with many people, but on a whim, I mailed a stack to my grandmother and waited. During the winter holidays, on our last visit together, my grandmother brought up my writing. I expected to bond with her over my writing; instead, she criticized it. Rather than react to the stories themselves, my grandmother quibbled over what genre the writing would fall into and ignored the content. I felt the sting of rejection from her along with her silence. I was angry with her, and my grudge continued even after her death. Our shared passion for writing should have been a connection point but instead was a point of contention.
After my mom died, I received several boxes of items that my aunt mailed to me. One of those boxes contained a heavy metal safe filled with fourteen 8 mm film reels. On some of the reel cases, labeled in my mom’s neat handwriting, are paper labels fixed over the faded ones. I didn’t open the box of film when it first came to my keeping in 1999. It wasn’t until 2020 that I opened the box again and rediscovered my inheritance of silent movies of silent people.
My grandfather was the first movie maker in our family. After his death, my mother took up the camera. I selected three reels in the collection and sent them to be digitized so that I could view them for the very first time. When I received them back, I watched them with growing heaviness. I didn’t recognize the people in the film – only my grandmother, Elsie, my mother, and her siblings. I hoped the reels would be a way to connect and to discover my family. Instead, I felt shut out from them and the secrets they carried. The films felt like a burden – I could not discard them, but I could not understand them either.
After watching them a few times, I wondered that perhaps I could look at them with the understanding that they were from my grandfather’s point of view. With the reels, he was capturing what was important to him and wanted to share. That change in perspective prompted me to reexamine the reels. One reel, labeled 1948 cottage, felt very significant as my mother’s frequently spoke about the cottage. My grandfather’s family kept the Finnish tradition of having a summer cottage that they would retreat to and enjoy the natural surroundings.
In the cottage reel, there was a vignette in which my grandfather approached my grandmother sitting in a lounge chair. Elsie sat with a big floppy hat covering her head, near their summer cottage on the shore of a lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In her hands she held some stiff fabric and needle that laced in and out of the cloth. Her arm arched up in the graceful, fluent curve of experienced hand stitching. It is a movement I’ve made thousands of times, that I’ve seen my mother make, and that that Elise’s mother, my great grandmother made as well must have made as evidenced by her sampler. I was stunned. I did not know my grandmother sewed.
A still of Elsie stitching from grainy family film
I’ve watched the footage many times since. Each time, I’m struck by the playfulness in the moment. The camera/grandfather coming upon a woman stitching by the lake. She looks up to see the camera and drops her hands to her lap and playfully nestles into her chair like she will soon take a nap. She smiles openly and knowingly at the camera. There is an intimacy there, a little quiet snapshot of the relationship between my grandparents — my grandfather silenced by a painful, early death and my grandmother’s silence that hid secrets and so much pain. My inheritance of these many film reels, once such an expensive and cumbersome burden, now unlocks little secrets. My grandmother sewed. My heart aches and I find myself releasing resentment that I held unconsciously for so many years against her. My grandmother was like me. Like her daughter. Like her mother.
Polaroid photo of Elsie, Me and my mother about 1990. Scan your old photos - they are rotting quick!