Hedwig Hauglin Birkeland

There is a photo of my grandmother standing with her friend Jenny Favey on the deck of the ship that brought her to America at the age of twenty. The youngest of ten children from a small, rocky fishing village in Northern Norway, her mother had told her that there was nothing for her there and that she must go to America to make her life. She never saw her mother again.

She traveled across the country to Poulsbo, Washington. She worked as a nanny, a cook, a waitress, and later in her life, cleaning office buildings in downtown Seattle. But those are not the things that I remember about my grandmother.

She was a tiny woman, not quite five feet in height, stocky in build, her beautiful chestnut hair in a bun, a powerhouse of determination and energy. She was a gourmet cook before we knew the term, shopping at the Pike Place Market and introducing my brother and me to Sunday chicken dinners with all the fruits and vegetables from her own garden, leg of lamb, kippered salmon, pickled herring, Scandinavian cookies and desserts, on and on it went. She thought nothing of walking three and a half miles to see a good friend, often setting a pace that we could hardly keep up with.

When our parents would go away, she and my grandfather babysat and we would spend time cooking, gardening, wood building, sewing, and, of course, Jim and I fighting. On the day that our fighting broke the silver creamer that had been her favorite wedding gift, she told my mother that she had dropped it on the floor. Now THAT impressed me as a six-year-old.

Late into my childhood, my grandmother worked cleaning office buildings at night and yet I never remember her sleeping. She fixed us breakfast, made bread and cinnamon rolls on Friday, canned fruits and vegetables, and taught me to knit at the age of ten and to use a treadle sewing machine. She made soap from lye and fat that she saved from cooking and made bed quilts, carding the wool batting from a friend’s sheep.

She taught me the importance of being “independent” and it was she who provided the small amount of sex education that I received. When she was seventy-five and I was twenty-four I decided to marry a Jewish man. My family was Lutheran, but her only question to me was “do you really love him?” I answered in the affirmative and I got her blessing.

My grandmother died when I was twenty-eight years old, a young wife and mother with my first child. Though that was nearly forty years ago, I think of her often. Every time that I fill a vase with flowers from my own garden, create a quilt (now one of my passions), or make our extended family a dinner, I know that some of my inspiration originated with her.

I doubt that my grandmother Hedwig Hauglin Birkeland ever knew what the word “heroine” meant. Yet as the years have passed and now as a grandmother myself, there is no doubt in my mind that she deserves her rightful place on this walk honoring women who are admired for their contributions, courage, and noble qualities. It was who she was, through and through.

Written by Judi Lone Brenes, her granddaughter