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A
woman's frustration and manifest determination to
overcome and
rule those who would rule her.
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A
Bastard Child
At nearly thirty years of age, my aunt's revelation came as a shock; I'd grown up in the south and grandmothers...even if they did emigrate to America, carried as a two-year-old child, just didn't...weren't...well, that didn't happen in our family. I didn't linger after my aunt's confession, but began doing some investigation of my own: looking through some old trunks in the attic at my aunts farmhouse in Wisconsin (the old Swedish homeplace). I was eventually able to identify the area of Sweden my great-grandmother had emigrated from with her illigitimate child and began by writing to the Swedish Embassy. They quickly put me onto a private researcher and within two months, I had a name and telephone number of a cousin in Sweden. I wrote the person in Sweden...my second cousin, assuming the information was true and received an answer within a month. Yes, his letter had said, he'd hear about us over there in Amerika (he wrote in Swedish). He had no proof...it was only a story that we shared the same great-grandfather. The illigitimate birth wasn't recognized in 1879. He also agreed to meet me if I came to his farm; he was too busy, he wrote, to leave for more than a day and coming to Amerika was out of the question; he had too many cows to milk. ©
2007 Smultron Publications, All Rights Reserved
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What is a Valkulla?
 Late spring in the Nordic countries found these young women, children, siblings and sometimes mothers and grandmothers, gathered together to drive the cows and goats from the fertile valleys, up into the mountain forest. They would spend the summer grazing the animals in the forest. Wild marsh hay, grass and even birch leaves...not a stem of grass or leaf was wasted, as often the animals were near starvation when spring arrived. More than one story relates to having to actually carry a starving “wintered cow” from the barn stall in the spring. continued in next chapter...
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