Helen Birkeland Lone

Somehow the definition of heroine “a woman admired or idolized for her courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities” seems one that my mother, Helen Lone, would be uncomfortable with. Born the only child of first generation Norwegian immigrants she grew up knowing how to “keep her own council.” She was a voracious reader, a creator of beautiful handwork, and a gardener that the Master Gardeners of today would be in awe of. She played the piano and organ while friends and family sang and danced around her. A server of healthy and beautiful meals, she never made a cup of coffee without a homemade cookie to accompany it. A quiet person, she never wanted to talk about herself much, but would often sit listening as friends and family told their stories, not judging, but often quietly saying “oh, that’s interesting.”      

She married my father Jim at the age of twenty-one and though she had graduated from business school, she stayed at home to raise my brother and me, rising every morning at 5:20 to prepare my dad a hot breakfast before he left on his milk route in Seattle six days a week. She had an instinctive eye for beauty, decorating our home with wall colors that you now use a color consultant to find. She canned fruits and the salmon that my dad caught, was once the Girl Scout district chairman for the cookie drive, filling our small home with cookies that lined the walls of our bedrooms, garage, and living room. She volunteered at the food bank and walked tirelessly for neighborhood donations to the Heart Association and the Cancer Society. She made quilts with friends at church to send across the world to places that she would never see.

In 1936 she and eleven friends started what they called “the sewing club.” It was a monthly time to gather together, work on sewing projects, and share their lives. Fifty years later when the Seattle Times newspaper wrote a story highlighting their group which was still meeting, I realized that they had created a “support group” long before the term was ever known.

In 1943, with my grandparents’ help, she and my dad bought a piece of property at Point No Point on Puget Sound. They built a small cabin there during WWII and it has remained the center of our family, now four generations later. Each weekend we would go there. She’d cook and organize food for family and friends, sometimes as many as eighteen around the eight hundred square foot cabin. On Sunday night she’d heat water on the wood stove, clean up, and we’d return to Seattle content that there was nowhere else that could be better. In her spare moments she would walk the beach, head down looking for shells and beautiful driftwood to create her mobiles and collages that still decorate the cabin today. At her and dad’s fiftieth wedding anniversary nearly eighty people arrived, many with photos of special times that they had spent at that small cabin.

As my parents grew older they were lucky to be able to travel some and they often came to visit us in Vancouver to spend time with my husband Phil and I and our children. It was then that I began to understand what a force my quiet mother had been in my life and in the development of who I was as a person. She told me once, “If you are lucky, your children will take you to places that you have never imagined.” When our son Matthew was going to celebrate his bar mitzvah and my dad (they were Lutherans) didn’t feel that he wanted to attend, it was my mother who said, “Give me some time, we’ll be there” and they were and it was to everyone’s delight, including my dad’s.

My mother, Helen Lone, died at the age of seventy-seven in 1991 from a brain tumor and all the stories and details of her life that I had planned to talk with her about were lost in her rapid mental decline. But, though I don’t have all those details, I’ve come to understand that the word “heroine” which qualifies her to be represented on this beautiful walk has a much broader meaning than that in the dictionary. It is in fact, all defined in the eye of the beholder.

Written by Judi Lone Brenes, her daughter