One Brilliant Day

Via the Vesterheim Museum, Decorah, IA


One Brilliant Day

A stolid Lutheran, in the photo she was
strapped into those boxy black shoes,
practical armor for the day ahead,
and for most of her life, until she began
to see things that others could not,
Anna leaned into her life, every day, as
she leaned into that well pump handle.
There was Anton, shot up as he waded ashore at Tarawa,
the gathering of uniforms, the knock at the door;
and the sale of the horses after the bank foreclosed,
the neighbors gathered in the barnyard, the move to town;
the slow loss of Emil’s mind as his heart gave out.
But now, as the shutter snapped,
on one brilliant day in March,
she was there, once again,
at the well pump. Capable hands
grasped the cool handle as she leaned in
to draw from the depths
her daily ration of the living water.

– Steve Peterson


Notes
This post is a response to a challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them in April.

Since I don't have a flock of family photos handy right now, I'm using historical photos from various places. I spent the last several weeks exploring and finding a group of photos to think and write about.

The photograph in this post comes from the Vesterheim Museum, our local Norwegian-American museum. At school we've worked with them (they are excellent!) on some immigration and history projects. This photo comes from some of that work.

I have no direct connection to the person in this photo, although it could easily have been my grandmother on my father's side of the family. Through the 1950s she lived on the farmstead, a hardscrabble farm in north central Minnesota. During all the time they lived there, they hand-pumped water from a well, kept animals of many types, raised some row crops as well as oats and hay for the horses. They barely got by. When grandfather died, grandma sold the animals, tools, and machinery and moved from the farm.

The events in the poem are not from my family's story. As the son of a teacher and a Lutheran preacher in small town Illinois, I spent a lot of time during my youth in church basements talking to people. I got a real appreciation for the lives of those who lived in the rural midwest.