My mother passed in 2022. For a variety of reasons, we did not go through my parents' house until last summer. I spent a week up there with four of my siblings, emptying drawers and closets, shredding papers and going through the effects of two long lives.  Not only was the house full of stuff, my parents also had a huge shop crammed with tools and a basement stacked with boxes. Even after the week we were there, a few things turned up. One find was this tine, which my brother discovered in the basement (we did not have time to go through every box down there).

A tine (pronounced tee-nah) is a traditional Norwegian box constructed of bent wood. Often they were used for carrying food--like a lunch pail. You open it by pulling the little ear-shaped handles at the side, which flexes the wood so the lid comes off. 

My grandmother was a folk painter, her work inspired by traditional rosemaling. In her kitchen, she painted the cupboard doors with flowers and had a round table with a sunflower in the middle. When I was a girl, her kitchen was one of my favorite places. (I wrote a bit about her painting in a previous blog post).

My mother had a sewing tine like this that my grandmother painted. This tine is not my mother's--hers had a different design and also had a broken side handle. I'm speculating that this tine may have been my grandmother's personal tine. However, we don't know. We don't even know for sure that she painted it, although it looks very much like her other work. My mother's is signed, and this one is unsigned.

I remember my mother's tine--not just the outside, but her tomato/strawberry pincushion, and especially the collection of buttons scavenged from old clothes. I loved to slide my fingers over the smooth buttons, squeeze the sandy-textured pincushion, fumble the thimble onto my thumb. So for me, getting this tine stirred up many memories. 

Because this tine was found after the week I was at my parents' house, I didn't get it until this Christmas. I planned to use it as a sewing tine myself, but I was unaware until I opened it that it was still full.

But why the little ballet dancer figurine, like one broken from a jewelry/music box? Why the lightbulb? And can I even take these things as relics of hers, since I am not 100% sure this was her tine? 

Getting this tine reminded me of how mysterious the lives of others are. No one knows anyone's full story. My grandmother died when I was in college. My parents, who might have been able to positively identify the tine, are both gone. 

My father's younger brother, my uncle David, passed over a year ago. He was a photographer and became a caretaker of many family photos. One of my cousins uploaded old photos he scanned. There are many pictures of my grandparents as well as of my father and his brothers. But the photos contain many more photos of people I cannot identify. And even the ones I can recognize are in contexts I can't fathom. Where and when and why were they taken? It's all mysterious.  

Writing fiction is a way to try to understand others as well as myself. But it's all guesswork. I could make up a story about why my grandmother saved that broken ballerina figure, but it would be fiction. Everyone I could ask is gone.

This picture from that trove of scanned photos is my grandmother as a young woman. It captures some of her humor and liveliness and the flair of a budding artist.​

2024 was a hard year. The presidential election sat hunched over the months like a looming storm cloud. None of us knew what kind of storm was coming, but we all had fears. The atmosphere made it difficult for me to concentrate. Sometimes I was able to put my fears aside and do some writing and submitting. Other times the atmosphere overtook me, and I an existential dread filled my head like static. 

And once the election was over, the dread became a kind of mourning for the hopes I had cherished, for the idea of my fellow Americans that I had to let go. One way I got through the first Trump term was telling myself that most Americans had not wanted this outcome. But in 2024--even after the courts have declared him a felon and a rapist, even after he encouraged his followers to invade the capital to overturn an election--so many people stood up and declared that was exactly what they wanted. It was a dark time. 

I start out every writing year with the hope that I will be more disciplined and focused, but I'm giving myself a bit of a pass for 2024. 

Even so, I DID manage some writing and submitting. Not as much as I hoped, but enough to get four stories published. My great thanks to the journals Microfiction Monday and the Eunoia Review for publishing my work. 

For those of you who didn't catch them when I originally posted them, here are the stories that I had published:

• "Across the Street from the Good Life," Eunoia Review, September, 2024
• "Let's Say," Eunoia Review, September, 2024
• "Can't Be too Careful," Eunoia Review, September, 2024
• "Inheritance," Microfiction Monday, February, 2024

And as for the coming year, I hope as always to write and submit more than I did the previous year. In 2024 I accomplished that, given that 2023 was a very low time for my submissions. 

Art is one of the ways we deal with dark times. I sing with two choruses, and this fall both directors tried to provide comfort and build resilient hope with their music selections. In the same way, reading and writing can be great sources of comfort and hope. My goal for 2025 is to do more of both, to nurture the sources of creativity that provide inspiration and energy to fight for a more just world, and to provide needed refuge from the fight.  

Here's to all of us continuing to do our needed work in the world in the coming year.