Family reunion in the USA

In a week, I will be traveling to the United States. It's been three years since I was there - the longest I've ever been away from my country of birth. The pandemic has meant a travel ban. The reason for the trip is to bury my mother's ashes and those of her brother and his wife. My mother's ashes will be buried almost exactly four years after her death. Her brother died five years ago and his wife more recently. It seemed like a good idea to make it a family reunion to celebrate these loved ones. We will all meet at Mapleside, near Paullina in the northwest corner of Iowa. The Quaker cemetery was established in the early 1900s and many of my Norwegian Quaker relatives are buried there. I was born into the Quaker Meeting at Mapleside, and I look forward to worshiping there with uncles and cousins, brothers and their families, and those members of the meeting whose loved ones are also buried at Mapleside.

Both my mother and I were born in Mapleside. My grandparents and parents were married in the meetinghouse there, and my grandparents' farm is my home, although I only visited it during my childhood and youth. And now other people live in that house, which has been renovated and modernized. It doesn't look the same when I find it on Google Earth, even though the barn and the corn crib are in the same place.

A distant cousin of mine has been researching the lives of those buried at Mapleside. She apparently has 500 pages of documentation. She will be with us the weekend we are gathered at Mapleside, and I look forward to meeting her. I will be taking with me some of the 4000 letters that my mother gave me before she died. They are letters written between 1896 and 1995, most of them written by women who now rest at Mapleside. Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, their sisters and cousins for four generations. I will be able to let some of their voices be heard and give some life to the research that my relative has done. One poignant detail is that my own letters to my parents are included in the treasure trove of letters. The earliest ones are from when I was 14 years old and in my first year at a Quaker boarding school. Letter writing continued weekly when I moved to Sweden in 1975 and stopped when Skype became our way of communicating.

This will be an epic journey, perhaps the last time I visit Mapleside. It will be a celebration of life and family. And I will be happy to return to my life and family here in Sweden after a couple of weeks.