Copyright © 2002-2010 by Debra J. Richardson. All rights reserved.
STONED
...a little girl lived in the Forest Hill woods of Minnesota in a tiny hilltop house perched across from a graveyard full of family bones. Her story owes its begetting, however, to ghostly mists of 16th century Hertfordshire, England—diffusing beyond to Scotland, Northern Ireland—gathering genesis in Germany, Switzerland, stretching backwards in time to medieval Scandinavia. It's a love conceived in the Old World, fused by lineages which traversed seas, and nutured in the wilderness of a new frontier.
Steeped within a Scandinavian subculture prevalent in Minnesota, the little girl yet grew up as a New England daughter. She felt herself a fish out of water, or more precisely, lutefisk out of a Lutheran church kitchen. In a land overflowing with coffee and krumkake, the Yankee Girl secretly subsisted on tea and crumpets, nursing and nurturing a nameless homesickness. Should ever she leave behind an autobiography for sake of family posterity, it will be titled "A Massachusetts Yankee in King Håkon's Court."
The story will relate how the little girl in the little house in the big woods grew up to get her Yankee roots—and more. She became a historian and a gravestone researcher. And she lived happily, to the very marrow of her ancestral bones, ever after.
Steeped within a Scandinavian subculture prevalent in Minnesota, the little girl yet grew up as a New England daughter. She felt herself a fish out of water, or more precisely, lutefisk out of a Lutheran church kitchen. In a land overflowing with coffee and krumkake, the Yankee Girl secretly subsisted on tea and crumpets, nursing and nurturing a nameless homesickness. Should ever she leave behind an autobiography for sake of family posterity, it will be titled "A Massachusetts Yankee in King Håkon's Court."
The story will relate how the little girl in the little house in the big woods grew up to get her Yankee roots—and more. She became a historian and a gravestone researcher. And she lived happily, to the very marrow of her ancestral bones, ever after.
Once upon a time...
The End.