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.