OLGA TO FLORIDA - TO GO OR NOT TO GO

 

When I lived in San Diego in 1972, I learned that my grandmother Olga and my aunt Anita planned a trip to America. My grandmother had all through her life, visited her four children  in Florida a great number of times. The trips usually lasted several months and she left my Swedish grandfather and the five children back in Sweden, longing for her return. When she left the family in Florida, they also longed for her return. But this time Olga was 82 years old and frail.

I had great hopes that my wonderful grandmother might visit me in California but I later learned that the trip would go to Florida via Albuquerque, New Mexico where my uncle Clas-Herbert (Claes) had moved. I had visited him there the year before and grandmother Olga had been thrilled to read my report from the trip. She might have been intrigued about the bar up in the mountains that he and his wife Betty managed. I had spent an evening there with my second cousin and his wife and we danced to lively Mexican music late into the night. When we drove home, down a narrow and curving road, car wrecks could be seen on each side of the road, stark reminders that one should not drink and drive. This was very primitive country. How Clas-Herbert had ended up there managing a bar was unknown to me but he was a very talented “Jack of all trades” and grandmother Olga wrote that her son should really have studied to become an architect. 

New Mexico had a special meaning to Olga.  She was born there, as she put it in another letter, “by a mother from an aristocratic family who had to rough it out there in the wild west ” while her husband made money during the silver rush in Kingston. She often talked about going there and asked if I would ever go there. Grandma lost two sisters to scarlet fever in Kingston and another sibling during a stage coach robbery when the family were on their way to move from Kingston to Jacksonville, Florida. 

Everything was ready for Grandmother Olga’s trip to America but in the middle of her final preparations, she suddenly felt nauseous and fainted. She quickly recovered but my mother and aunt were concerned and called an emergency doctor who did not recommend her to proceed with her travels. Deflated, Grandmother Olga returned to Lysholmen and a few days later she wrote this letter to me.

“March 17, 1972

Dearest Leif,

Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday!!

Today is your birthday and poor you, no letter, no present, you must think me a crazy old grandmother and that is just what I feel like. I’ve been in an awful circle of indecision lately. I had planned to fly over to the States with Anita and here I am, still here and can’t understand why  I should be in such a state. There must be some reason for it. Maybe I should not go, perhaps there is a power far greater than the power we know about, a power that just invisibly inexplicably just keeps me here, like gravitation - I want to go and I have been to the airlines and sat there for hours while they got all my connections clear. And while I was there discussing my trips, Gothenburg, New York, Albuquerque  and Florida, I fully intended coming but when I got home to Anita’s flat, in Gothenburg I just seemed to stop thinking about the trip.“

My mother had written to me about grandma Olga’s fainting spell. In a way I am glad that she did not go on her trip. It would have been quite a strain with such a long trip at that age and with her heart condition. Her last trip was in 1969 when she felt she had to go to Florida to be a part of the sale of the Seminole Hotel that she owned with her siblings there. Her letter continues:

“Now I’m back at Lysholmen having spent all last week in town with your aunt Anita and your mother and it looks like I will not make the trip  —  and now the sun is bright and warm and Linnea has Stengården (the winter garden) ready for summer. Life is strange for some people, one can’t do anything about it but the feeling is a bit uncanny - why I’m still here when everything was ready for the trip. I had even packed and all my clothes were in order.”

Poor grandma. Her will to travel to her native country was very much there but her body had told her something else. She had  always been used to doing what she wanted and had been a courageous woman, doing what other people would not dare to even think about. So no wonder she felt odd when nature reigned her in like this.

Below is a photo collage of some important dates when Olga went to Florida. The first was in 1913 when she, only 23 years old, with two children and a nanny, embarked on an ocean voyage via Hamburg and new York, to Florida. Her parents wanted to spoil their daughter and get her to relax from the hardship of the last (third) baby Mary which was left behind with a nanny. Olga’s father in particular was eager to show her his new Greenfield plantation, the new house and to talk about the animals he planned to buy. The parents had paid for this trip and they had insisted on the safest possible vessel, the German “ Imperator”. It had a double hull och thus it could not sink as easily as the Titanic did the year before in 1912.

ON RECEIVING A LETTER FROM GRANDMA OLGA

July 24, 1970

“Dearest Leif,

Forgive me please for my negligence in answering your letters. I procrastinate, it’s a fault not easy to conquer. I’m of an absorbing nature, the many people around me, the many problems constantly popping up to be solved, worthless interruptions all day long, unable to isolate my thoughts and concentrate. And when the twelve hours of a day come to an end, I’m utterly exhausted and fall for a drink, foolishly imagining this will help. It does for an hour or toward but when this is over, they day after, is the same as the day before. I feel I must learn the power of concentration - or maybe better still, the grave might offer peace  - although I do not like this last idea, better to keep on coping with the present.”

Poor 80 year old Grandma Olga, besides dealing with a steady stream of news from her nine children and grandchildren, she has to run her large house and grounds with a single helper, the 70 year old cook and housekeeper Linnea. Her daughter Gunilla comes out from Gothenburg on weekends when she does not work, helping with things like the yearly preparation of the three rental cottages that bring welcome income. Olga describes her daughter Gunilla as ”soothing, helpful and effective” . Olga loves all her daughters and Sigrid from Florida who recently visited, lifted her spirits. ”It was nice having Sigrid, she was so spontaneous, happy and a horn of of optimism - I’m inclined to be the opposite. I miss her terribly”.

Grandmother Olga explains what has been troubling her this particular day in July. Most importantly, the telephone has been out of order and she is not able to get in contact with her American guests who are on their way. Linnea, the cook has on her own decided, together with some other person, to burn some brush, trash and branches and in the process of doing this they have managed to burn a plastic water hose lying on top of the ground, depriving her grandchild Peder of water in a cottage on her land. Her other grandchild Jan, lost 2 of his his expensive fishing nets in this fire. How could this have happened? She writes “I’m eighty and can’t trott all over the place looking for the most vulnerable spots where Linnea and her helper have placed their piles of ‘scraps’ to be burned.  I should have an overseer but who can afford a man of this type when we are almost completely crushed under taxes?”

Such a man would no doubt have advised against a bonfire in the middle of high summer (it could actually be illegal) but the summer (only ten days of sunshine) has been miserable so it might not have been quite so dangerous. She ends somewhat morbidly, “Will the world one day come to end  -  and thus solve all our problems…”

A three day storm has finally subsided. It is not possible to sit in the chairs in the loggia because “the pillows and chair covers have been sucked up by the fierce wind and thrown God only knows where, we will all have to search when calm descends upon us. What an awful summer and  poor Peter and Kenneth who are on their boats for one month holiday. They have not drowned yet and we expect them to come home alive next week”. So problems have piled up this summer and Olga reflects “I’m just living in hopes of a miracle or I may solve the problems, console and pacify my frustrated nerves with a stiff Johnny Walker”.

It is in Grandmother Olga’s nature to lovingly worry and care  for everyone in her large family, nine children and around thirty grandchildren. She is very generous and my sisters and I grew up, happily receiving beautifully Shalimar scented notes. She gladly shared the money that her father had made in the last century prospecting  for silver in New Mexico and from property investments in Jacksonville, Florida. Yes, Grandmother Olga cares for everyone and that includes her old friends who once were wealthy with grand homes but now live on reduced incomes, some are also, like her, old and sometimes sickly and she wants to make them happy by inviting them to come and stay for a week or two in her grand home. Linnea will of course make nice dinners and care for them. Linnea has an advantage on them, she is ten years younger but no longer strong enough to wash sheets and towels by hand so she packs them into a trolley and takes a bus to the nearby town and goes to a laundromat. That is quite an excursion for her and maybe a welcome change of scenery. And being of a mostly  jolly disposition, she gets to speak to new people.

Grandmother Olga also cares for the locals including the painter and plumber whom she has known for a long time. She also knows the two ladies from Jehovahs Witness who visit occasionally. Of course they are  all invited for a friendly chat. The painter and the plumber are very fond of Olga and they have both exchanged their services for one of her oil paintings. When the owner of the local grocery store married, the wedding couple was given a set of silver cutlery by Olga and her husband Folke. When people suffered during the Great Depression and WW2, Olga delivered food baskets in her large American car to the needy in the area.

I feel sorry for grandmother Olga being exhausted at the end of the day. She no doubt misses her energetic days when she was full of creativity and unafraid to fly in a two seater plane during WW2 to find her wounded son Folke at a Red Cross hospital in Paris. But to return to the letter grandma Olga was writing to me in July 1970  — having given me all the family news, she finishes by saying that she misses my cutting remarks full of humour and asks me if I need money over there in San Diego. If so, I should contact my uncle in Florida who manages her money.  I appreciate the gesture and I would never think of doing that. I am happy to have lived at Lysholmen for free during two semesters in 1969. 

I am so glad to read my grandmother’s letter 54 years later when I am almost as old as she was when she wrote to me in 1970. It’s like talking to her again. We no longer write old fashioned letters but if you have one, save it. If you receive important or special emails, make a printouts and save them. One day you might enjoy reading them again.