I Carried It With Me


She sat on a bench in the shade of a lilac bush, the mountain behind her steep and still. It was late afternoon, and the garden was bathed in the pale light that slanted over the neighbor’s rooftop. The letter lay unfolded in her lap, the handwriting faded at the edges. It was from her father, written many years ago, back when she was still the girl from Balestrand, with wide eyes and a schoolbook in hand.

Her name was Bertha, and there was never anything small about it, her father had said. It was meant to carry her across the ocean, he told her when she was little. But that was before everything started to shift, before her uncles came home.

Balestrand lay like a white jewel against the deep blue water, where the fjord opened like a welcoming hand. The Sande property had three buildings tucked between hillside and shore, and on either side her father’s land stretched out – woods, trails, and steep ground rising straight up from the water. It wasn’t quite a farm, but it was a small kingdom, a space for children and grandparents and the people who came and went.

Grandfather Bjørn had once sailed a cargo ship in and out of the fjord, all the way to Bergen, before he sold the boat and bought the land in Balestrand. He laughed a lot, that grandfather, and her father's mother – Tolvarg – could cut through bone with a glance. She kept order. He kept things light.

And then there was Kviknes Hotel, the large white building that stood on the point like a ship anchored to the land. In summer, the English and Germans arrived in flocks, with trunks and nannies, hats as wide as dining tables, and voices that didn’t belong there. Balholm, the little island, sat like a fairy tale just offshore, connected to the hotel by a bridge. There were bathhouses and gazebos, and one could drink coffee while gazing across the fjord and speaking of nothing in particular.

Her father was a cabinetmaker and woodcarver, a man with an eye for lines and hands that never rested. He had studied in Germany and built their home with a cellar and running water – something no one else had. It was a house with large rooms and a workshop downstairs. But the land he left to others. He had his hands full with the wood.

She remembered the smell of the basement – sawdust, dampness, and resin. When she closed her eyes, she could still see it: the way the light fell in soft strips through the workshop window, and the gentle sound of the plane gliding over the plank.

Now she sat in America, an old woman, looking out over another garden, in another land, with different birds. But the fjord was still there before her – not physically, but as a vivid, burning dream. And in her mind, the story began again, as it often did when she sat like that: the day her uncles came home, with polished boots and talk of something grand waiting on the other side of the world.

The Uncles Come Home

It began with the sound of horseshoes striking the flagstones in the farmyard, on a late summer day when the sun hung low over the fjord and dust rose from the road below. Two men came walking with long strides and fine clothes—one wearing a hat and shiny shoes, the other in a jacket sewn from coarse, dark velvet. They carried the world in their movements. And that world had a name: America.

Bertha stood behind the living room window and watched. She knew who they were—the uncles from the Hoheim side, brothers of her stepmother Britta. They had sent letters, many letters, and in each one was a scent and a promise foreign to a fjord village where everyone knew everyone else.

Now they stood in the yard, laughing loudly, their voices carrying through the garden and into the house. They greeted people with firm handshakes and clapped her father on the shoulder as if he were an old workmate. Her father smiled, but not with his eyes. There was something uneasy in him, like the feeling of a storm building behind the mountains but never breaking through.

"Everything is bigger over there," said the taller uncle, the one with the hat. "You’ve never seen forests so deep, or rivers so wide. And the soil! Just stick your spade in the ground, and up comes the harvest."

"And the pay!" added the other. "I earned more in three weeks than I did in three months back home," he said, glancing at Britta, who nodded eagerly.

It was Britta who sparkled the most. She had never quite settled into the big house at Sande. Grandmother—Tolvarg—watched her with eyes that measured everything and said very little. There wasn’t room for two queens in one house.

"In Bellingham, we have everything. We all live together—it’s like a little village of Norwegians. You get neighbors who understand you, but you don’t have to deal with all this old-country nagging and nonsense. Over there, you’ve got a real chance to become something."

Bertha listened from the stairs. Her stomach fluttered—but not with excitement. She’d heard stories before—on the church steps, from tourists at the hotel—but this was different. This had come into her own kitchen, into her own space.

Her father said little. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring out the window where the fjord lay still as glass. He had built the house with his own hands, planed every board, set every beam. Now he sat silent, listening to his brothers-in-law talk about leaving it all behind.

Later that evening, she heard Britta and Grandmother in low conversation out in the hallway. It wasn’t the first time they disagreed, but there was something final in their tones. Grandmother didn’t say much—but she didn’t need to. She was the kind who knew that silence could break more than words.

Bertha went to bed with images in her head: big houses, wide fields, trains rushing through endless landscapes. But in the middle of it all stood her father, his eyes full of fjord light and a restlessness that wouldn’t let go. And deep down, she knew—something had begun to crack.

Childhood

Bertha didn’t know what longing was—not until the kitchen grew quiet and her mother didn’t come back. She was only sixteen months old when Kari died, but the time that followed remained like a hollow space inside her. It was her grandmother who took her in.  Tolvarg.  When people said her name outloud, it was with a mixture of respect and fear.  Tolvarg:  A woman with a straight back and eyes that saw everything.

Bertha learned early to move quietly—but she also learned to sing. Her grandmother sang hymns every evening, even though her voice was sharp. there was a lift in those old melodies that settled into the girl’s body. And when she wasn’t singing, she read—slowly, aloud—with her finger tracing the lines, and Bertha sat spellbound, her gaze locked on the Bible while her thoughts drifted far away.

Her father lived with them, in the same house, and at night they slept in the same room. He had lost his wife, but not his daughter, and there was a bond between them that needed no words. He taught her stories from the Bible, but it wasn’t preaching—it was like fairy tales, told by a man who had carved every figure in wood. Because that’s what he did—he carved life into wood, with a craftsman’s quiet devotion and an artist’s eye.

The house they lived in was unlike any other in the village. It was large, with a basement and running water—a marvel in itself. The basement was built as a workshop, with concrete floors and planing benches along the walls. It smelled of wood and oil, and when her father worked, the shavings floated through the air like small, weightless birds. Bertha loved being down there, watching his hand glide over the wood, measuring, considering.

But even though the house was large and the garden wide, it wasn’t a farm. They had no cows or sheep, and the land wasn’t cultivated. It was as if her father had turned away from the old way of life—he wanted to build, not till the soil.  The villagers likely frowned at that. In Balestrand, everyone knew who owned what and who lived properly.

It was the old families—Sande and Ruud—who carried the weight of tradition. And people talked. They always talked, especially when someone went their own way. Her father had studied in Germany, learned a trade, and come home with ideas. And the house he built showed it. But he didn’t dig in the soil, and he didn’t need livestock to know his worth.

Bertha felt it, even as a child. She knew that some children came from farms with roots deep in the earth, while she came from a house filled with wood shavings and tall windows. On her way to school, she could see the difference—in the boots, in the lunches, in the way people nodded—or didn’t.

But she carried it with a quiet kind of pride. Because she had been given a gift: her father’s gaze. When he looked at her, it was as if he saw something greater than what people whispered about. He saw her as a dream about to awaken. And for a long time, that was enough.

A Schoolgirl with Dreams

Bertha sat with her forehead against the window, watching the rain stream down the glass in thin lines. Inside the classroom, it was quiet—only the sound of the teacher’s pencil on the chalkboard and the soft shuffle of shoes across the floor. She had always loved this kind of silence. There was something in her that longed for structure, for rhythm and order—a place where everything had meaning, where one could find their way.

She was seven years old when she started school with Mrs. Sverdrup, the pastor’s wife. It was a private arrangement, reserved for a few, and it felt like a door had opened to a world she didn’t know existed. Mrs. Sverdrup was strict and calm, but she saw Bertha. And there was something in that gaze—not loving, but evaluating—that made the girl want to reach higher.

From that day on, Bertha carried books as if they were treasures. She learned her letters quickly, started reading before most others, and would stay up at night with her eyes buried in the Bible, the newspaper, and old folk tales. After that first year, she continued on to regular school, but the teacher there also recognized what she carried within her. He let her borrow books to take home and said she had a clear mind—just far too quiet.

She didn’t like housework. She tried—folding linens, polishing copper—but everything in her resisted it. She didn’t burn for freshly ironed curtains, but for sentences, language, and thought. There was something untamed in her, a quiet rebellion that carried her from classroom to classroom, from Balestrand to Leikanger, and on to Nordfjordeid. With each place, she added pieces to the picture of who she was becoming.

She made friends, especially among those who also read and dreamed. One of them was the daughter of a teacher—they often sat together after school, reading aloud and writing little stories. They laughed a lot, but there was also a seriousness in their friendship: both knew the world was bigger than the village they were growing up in. And both carried the dream of something more.

Bertha studied English in Nordfjordeid, and there was something about those words that made her look beyond the fjord—as if language could build a bridge to something entirely new. She didn’t know where she wanted to go, but she knew she couldn’t stay. She wanted to learn, to go deep into knowledge, to become something other than what was expected of a young woman.

And yet—every time she came home for exams, her father stood there in the doorway, hands behind his back with that quiet smile only he had. He said little, but his eyes said everything: he believed in her. He saw more than a child—he saw a dream building itself into being.

Bertha didn’t know where the road would lead next, but she knew she was on her way.

The Message

She stood in the middle of the courtyard in Nordfjordeid with the letter in her hand. The handwriting was her father’s—upright, but trembling. He asked her to come home at once. “It’s urgent,” it said. Nothing more. And in that moment, she knew something was starting to fall apart.

The journey home passed in a quiet storm of emotion. She stared out the window at the fjord, at hills she knew by heart, and everything seemed steeper than before, as if the land itself was trying to hold her back. It didn’t rain, but the air was heavy. Like the moment when a storm holds its breath.

Her father waited at the dock. He said little. Bertha looked at his face—the deepening lines around his mouth, the way he clasped his hands together—and she understood this wasn’t his idea. He was a man who built things—not one who tore them down.

It was Britta who had pushed for this. Her stepmother. She was already inside, packing trunks. They had made the decision while Bertha sat in a classroom, reading Shakespeare and memorizing English words, believing life still lay ahead of her like an open book.

“America,” Britta said. “We’re going with Ole. Everything’s arranged. It’s better over there. There are opportunities.”

Bertha said nothing. She just looked at her father. He looked away. That was the worst part.

She walked out into the garden. The house stood as it always had, white and grand, shadows of life in every corner. The basement still smelled of wood and woodworking. She moved from room to room like someone saying goodbye to the dead.

Grandmother stood in the doorway. She didn’t say much either. But her eyes were clear.

“You have a choice,” she said softly.

“I don’t,” Bertha replied.

The night before they left, she stayed awake. She looked at her hands—small, but strong. She had used them to write, to shape thoughts and sentences. Now they would dust shelves, scrub floors. She knew it. There were no fairy tales waiting for her. Only work. And distance. An entire ocean between her and everything she had believed was true.

“We left everything—with nothing,” she would say later. And it was true. Uncle Ole had said you could buy anything in America, but he didn’t know what it meant to leave a room where her father had carved every molding with his own hands.

Her father put money in the bank for her. In case she ever wanted to come back, he said. That was how he apologized.

But there are losses that can’t be bought back. And Bertha felt it in every fiber as they boarded the ship in Bergen: she was no longer a schoolgirl with dreams. She was an emigrant. And the wind over the fjord knew it, even if it didn’t say a word.

Across the Ocean

It was quiet when the ship pulled away from the dock in Bergen. You could still hear the seagulls long after the mountains had slipped behind the horizon, like dreams that refused to let go. Bertha stood at the railing, watching the fjord disappear. She didn’t say goodbye—not out loud. But inside, she was screaming.

She had known it would hurt, but not like this. It didn’t feel like grief—not exactly. It was more like a dull numbness, as if her body understood something before her mind could catch up. She gripped the railing tightly and stared toward the horizon, where nothing was waiting.

Bergen disappeared. Norway shrank, becoming nothing more than a line in the distance. She stood there for a long time, until the wind made her eyes dry. It wasn’t tears that fell, she told herself—it was sea air.

They traveled via England. Everything was new, loud, overwhelming. Train stations where no one spoke her language, but where the smells—coal, dirt, tobacco—were the same as in the dreams she’d never asked for.

She didn’t get seasick on the ship crossing the Atlantic, but everything inside her shifted out of place. She lay awake at night, the ocean thudding against the hull like a heartbeat she couldn’t trust.

And then there were the bagpipes. Two men from Scotland played almost every evening, and the sound was like a cry from another world—beautiful and unbearable at once. She couldn’t escape it, and she didn’t want to. Because in those tones was something she recognized: longing, loss, loneliness. The men sat outside, letting the pipes weep for all who had lost something they couldn’t name.

Bertha sat alone, her hands folded in her lap. Around her, people chatted, ate, sang. But inside, it was as if she watched everything through a pane of glass, as if she were standing outside her own life.

One evening, her father came and sat beside her. He didn’t speak at first. They just sat there. The ocean was dark, the stars bright. Then he pulled out a small notebook and placed it in her hands.

“Write,” he said. “When you can’t say it, write it.”

She nodded. That was the closest he ever came to making a promise. And it was enough.

Boston. A name. A blur. Bertha didn’t remember much—only that her head hurt, and people were pushing, shouting, waving. Everything moved in one direction, and no one knew why. She simply followed, the notebook in her bag, seawater still in her legs.

She knew she wouldn’t see the fjord again for a long time. But she also knew she carried it inside her—like a scent, like a word, like a line in the palm of her hand. And maybe, one day, she would write it all down.

A New Land, a Different Bertha

The train cut through the land like a glowing beast. It smoked and shook, and with every jolt, it pulled them deeper into something she didn’t recognize. Bertha sat with a blanket around her shoulders and a restlessness she didn’t know where to place. Her head ached. Her eyes throbbed. She thought maybe it was just the journey—all the newness, all the strangeness. But by the time they arrived in Lawrence, Washington her forehead was hot and red blotches had appeared behind her ears.

It was measles. She’d infected the whole neighborhood at the welcome party before she even knew what was running through her body. The next day, she was in bed with the curtains drawn, a cup of water beside her, and the sound of people walking quietly around the room without speaking. She knew she wasn’t exactly popular.

She wished she were dead. Not dramatically, not with cries—just a quiet fading away, a way out of the unknown. She missed everything and everyone: the fjord, the school, the old books, the stillness of the workshop basement. She missed her father, even though he was just one room away.

But her body wanted to live, even if she wasn’t sure. And slowly, she began to recover. Outside, the landscape wasn’t beautiful. Everything looked half-finished—trees cut down, blackened stumps, soil that didn’t seem to know what it wanted to grow. She looked at it through the window and thought, Is this all there is?

When autumn came, they moved to Bellingham. Her father had found work at a sawmill deep in the woods. It was hard, poorly paid, but he didn’t complain. He just worked.

Bertha stayed home with Britta and the two little ones. She helped with errands, learned her way around the American shops, walked the children to school. The youngest—her brother—refused to go without her. So she sat in the classroom for weeks, a quiet shadow at his side. The teacher let her stay. And after a while, she said Bertha should try school herself—she could already read English.

They placed her in fifth grade. Bertha didn’t say anything, but inside she thought: I’m eighteen. I don’t belong here.
Still, she went every day. She learned, listened, wrote. And slowly, something new began to grow. She was no longer just the one who had lost everything. She was the one starting over.

One day, Uncle Ole came to visit. He looked at her with that same assessing gaze he always had and said bluntly:

“Your father doesn’t earn enough. You need to start earning for yourself.”

Bertha didn’t reply. But something shifted inside her—not a shock, but a confirmation of what she already knew. Childhood was over. Now came what was next.

She looked at her hands—hands that had held books and written dreams. Now they would scrub, fold, carry. She didn’t know what kind of work awaited her. But she knew she would take it.
For her father. For the little ones.
And to find herself in something new.

The First House

She wasn’t ready, but she went anyway. Uncle Ole had arranged it—as he always did—and said it in his firm way: “You’re going to meet a dentist. He needs help around the house. Say yes.”

At first, she thought it was a checkup, a dental appointment. But when she stepped into the large, quiet house that smelled of menthol and leather, she realized it was something else. The dentist’s wife looked pale and tired, but smiled kindly. She showed her around—kitchen, living room, staircase, guest room. There wasn’t much to do, she said, just a bit of help, a bit of order.

Bertha said yes. She didn’t even know what she’d said yes to.

The days began with sounds she wasn’t used to: clinking porcelain, an alarm clock she couldn’t find, a language she only half understood. But there was a rhythm to the chores. She cleaned, folded, carried, ran errands. Everything had to be shown first—how to mop a floor in this house, how to fold a shirt the way they wanted it.

She thought she was the worst housemaid in the world.

But she stayed. And something inside her began to grow. Because they didn’t treat her like a servant—they treated her like a person. She was invited to eat with the family, allowed to borrow books, encouraged to ask questions. And most importantly: they had an adopted daughter—a young woman, smart and independent, who worked at the courthouse and read more than Bertha had ever dreamed of.

Bertha looked at her like a kind of star. She spoke perfect English, had goals and opinions, and wasn’t afraid to laugh out loud or speak her mind. And she saw Bertha. She sat with her in the evenings, corrected her pronunciation, explained expressions. Small steps, but big changes.

One summer, the family had an idea: they would travel to the World’s Fair in Seattle. They brought Bertha along. It was the first time she’d ever been to a city. Everything was bigger—the streets, the smells, the colors. But one building pulled her in more than anything else: the library.

She found it by chance, but when she walked in, it felt like stepping into a cathedral. The smell of dust and quiet, shelves of books stretching to the ceiling. And there, between American classics and English novels, she found them: Bjørnson, Ibsen, old Norwegian poets she’d heard about back home.

She sat on a bench and read until the sun dropped low in the window. No one asked her to leave. No one questioned what she was doing there. And suddenly, she knew: there was room for her too, in this country.

When she returned to Bellingham, she carried something new inside her. She was still a housemaid—but not only that. She had started to feel a different kind of language—both outside and within. A language that could lift her, shape her, give back something she thought she had lost.

The Second House

The house was larger. Quiet in a different way. Everything was hushed, as if even the air had to tiptoe. There was a gardener, a cook, a head butler—and then Bertha. She wore a black dress with a white collar and was responsible for everything upstairs: bed linens, floors, flowers, and table settings.

She hadn’t known what a “second maid” was when she applied for the job—only that it didn’t involve cooking. That was enough for her.

This house was its own world. The servants ate in the kitchen, each with their own role and story. But Bertha rarely sat with them. She always found something to do—a flowerpot to water, a room to air out. People said she was polite but reserved. And she felt it too: there was a wall between her and the others, built of language.

The lady of the house didn’t say much, but approved her work with a slight nod. And the kitchen was a world unto itself, ruled by the cook. Bertha stayed out of the pots and pans. She knew where the boundaries were. What the others didn’t know about her was that she came from a place where her father carved furniture by hand, that she had read Ibsen under a birch tree in Balestrand, and that she still heard the fjord in her dreams.

And then there was the chauffeur.

He wasn’t like the others. He was the son of a doctor in town, but worked as a chauffeur because he loved cars. He spoke easily, laughed with his whole body, and had a look in his eyes that reminded her of something she had tried to forget.

One day, when everyone else was busy, he asked:

“Want to go for a ride around Lake Washington? I just gave the motorcycle a tune-up.”

She hesitated. She had never sat on anything like that. But something in her—an old strength, maybe, or just stubbornness—made her nod.

They rode with the wind pulling at her skirt, her heart pounding. At first she clung on in fear, then in pure exhilaration. The world blurred by in flashes of green, the water gleamed like silver. She wanted to scream, but instead she laughed.

Afterward, she didn’t say much. Neither did he. But something inside her had loosened—like a knot she hadn’t known was there.

Longing and Shame

It was one of her days off. She had taken the bus into town alone, as she sometimes did. Bertha liked it. Sitting and looking out the window, letting the city pass by like a movement she didn’t have to take part in. It felt safer that way—to be a passenger, to hide within the crowd.

She had stopped by the library, flipped through old poems she recognized, breathed in the smell of paper and silence. She had planned to go to an exhibit, maybe pick up something sweet from a bakery and head back to the house before anyone noticed she’d been gone.

But then, behind her on the bus—two voices. Women. Clear, warm, and yet solid as stone.

“You see,” said one, in Norwegian, “I told her: You don’t get to complain if you don’t do anything about it.”

Bertha froze.

She recognized the dialect. Sogn, but with a trace of Swedish. The other voice answered, more softly. They laughed a little.

It wasn’t the laughter that brought tears to her eyes, but the feeling of belonging—and not daring to say so. She sat still, hands folded in her lap. She could have turned around. Could have said: I’m Norwegian too. I understand you. I miss it, I do.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she sat motionless, her back straight and her eyes fixed on a spot outside the window. She felt ashamed. But she didn’t know of what. For having forgotten something? Or for remembering too much?

She had learned the language now—the American one. She could answer, understand, read the paper. She had started thinking in it, dreaming in it. But the Norwegian lay beneath it all like a soft layer, and every time she heard it—on the radio, in a book, or now, from two women on a bus—it sent a wave through her she couldn’t hold onto.

It was like standing between two doorways, not fully welcome in either.

When she got off the bus, her body felt lighter, but her heart heavier. She looked down at her shoes and knew she had taken yet another step away from who she once was. And that maybe, she could never fully go back.

But she carried it with her—the language, the silence, the longing. And that would have to be enough.

Love

It wasn’t the kind of love that struck like lightning. It wasn’t flowers and sweaty hands, not heartbeats pounding in her chest. It began with a chair—and a glance.

She’d been invited to join the church choir by a Norwegian girl in the neighborhood. At first, she hesitated, unsure if she wanted to be part of anything. But then she said yes. Maybe because she missed singing. Maybe because she needed to belong.

He was there when she arrived—tall and thin, with dark hair and a smile that didn’t need to convince anyone. He held the door open and pointed to an empty chair.

“Sit here,” he said. “Seems it’s full everywhere else.”

He said it in Norwegian. Clear, but with a hint of the Midwest. She looked at him, nodded, and sat down. That was all.

They sang together. Voices finding each other before words did. He was a university student, studying to become an engineer. She didn’t quite know what she was becoming—only that she wasn’t there yet.

He didn’t ask much. And she liked that. Because she needed time. Every time someone looked at her as if she were a future wife, her stomach tightened. She didn’t want to be tied down. Not yet. She had too much to learn.

So she took night classes. Learned more English, the history of the country she now lived in, arithmetic. She carried notebooks in her bag, sat hunched over tables in dim rooms, read until her eyes burned. He waited. And that was what made her begin to trust him. That he waited without pushing.

“You’re wise,” he said once. “You have eyes that see what others don’t.”

She looked down. Because even now, after everything she had achieved, she still felt too small. Too provincial, too plain, too uncertain. His family was someone in Seattle. Sylliaasen. They had plans for him—and she knew she wasn’t part of them.

But he didn’t give up. He came when she sang. Sat beside her at meetings. Carried her books home through slush and wind. And one evening, he took her hand in his without asking.

It no longer felt sudden. It was quiet. Like a river finding its mouth and knowing it had waited there all along.

She didn’t say yes. Not right away. But she didn’t let go of his hand either. And inside her, something new began—not a new role, but a space she could grow in. With her own voice. Her own direction.

And he walked beside her. Not ahead. Not behind.

A Woman’s Gaze

The wedding was small, but beautiful. A little white church, quiet and still, with windows that let the light in like soft water. She wore a simple, long white dress. No invitations had been sent to his family. Everything happened {in silence}quietly. But she remembers it as beautiful. A space where she was allowed to be who she truly was.

He had chosen her. Despite his family’s expectations. They had picked out a woman from their own world—with the right name, the right manners. But he had chosen her: the housemaid with books in her bag and the fjord in her heart.

She came to his home as a guest, but never quite as one of them. Her father-in-law, a contractor and a friend of men like Pantages, was kind enough, but distant. Her mother-in-law said little. Her eyes spoke more than words ever could. They said: You don’t really belong.

But she found peace in what little they had. A small apartment on Capitol Hill, a table with room for two, books along the wall, and a dream slowly built by warm hands and daily bread.

Then came the child. A daughter. Jane. And with her, a new strength. She felt it already in her body while carrying her—that she would never again doubt her own ability. She had created something. She could nurture something forward.

With the child in her arms, she looked at her hands—the same hands that once ran over carved wood in the basement back in Balestrand, the same hands that held books in the Seattle library, the same hands that clung the person in front of the motorcycle. Now they held something entirely new.

They lived in Seattle for a while, but then came the opportunity—a building project in Memphis, her father-in-law’s major undertaking. Her husband went first, and she and Jane followed. She remembers that first Southern summer: the scent of magnolias, the steam rising from the river, and a strange stillness in everything.

People were different. Warm, impatient, but honest. And to her surprise, she liked it. It wasn’t the West Coast—but something of its own. A place for growth. They lived in a white house with a porch, and again she felt: I’m building something here.

Then came the telegram. Her father had died.

She sat for a long time with the paper in her hand, as if she could hold on to the lines and pull him back. The man who had taught her Bible stories, who had built their home with his own hands, who had looked at her with a gaze no one else ever had.

But grief wasn’t only darkness. She knew that now: she carried him with her. In the way she spoke to her daughter. In the strength that came from never giving up. In the way she looked at the world—a woman’s gaze, steady and unafraid.

And when one morning she looked at herself in the mirror and no longer saw a servant, but a person with a life of her own—then she knew she had arrived.

Not to the end. But home.

The Inheritance

There were days when she forgot where she came from. Days when life blended into American newspapers, daily routines, and English in her mouth. But then there were other days—days when a voice, a taste, a melody pulled her back.

Bertha could no longer speak the pure dialect of Sogn, not like her grandmother once had, but she carried it with her. In her movements. In her tone. In the quiet defiance she wore with dignity.

To be Norwegian, she thought, was not just geography. It was a way of seeing the world. A way of standing erect. It lived in how one stood upright when the wind blew, in how one kept their word even when it cost something. It lived in being proud, but not loud. In working without demanding attention.

She saw it in herself when raising Jane. In the words she chose, in how she looked at her daughter when she sang, in the quiet expectation she carried—not for success, but for honesty. For wholeness.

She kept singing, even after she no longer stood at the front of the choir. She sang in the kitchen. In church. In women’s groups where other immigrant women found each other through food, stories, and old songs. She joined women’s associations, but never as a leader. That wasn’t her way. She brought books, songs, stories. She gave and never asked for anything back.

That was what created community—not position, but presence. And she saw how important it was: to hold on to something when the world kept changing. They read Bjørnson, they discussed Ibsen, and in the meeting of words and life, they found resonance. She saw others recognize what she had always felt: that roots don’t have to be in the ground to grow—they can grow in memory, in community, in song.

She often thought about the difference between the two countries she now carried inside her. In Norway, everything had been quiet, strict, but also clear. A person knew where they stood, even if it was on the outside. In America, everything was possible—but also uncertain. You could become anything—but you could just as easily disappear into the crowd.

There was something in her that never quite adjusted to American politeness. All the smiling small talk, all those invitations that meant nothing. In Norway, people said little—but meant it. Here, they said a lot—and disappeared.

And still—she had built a life. A new one. And the old life wasn’t gone. It lived on her shelves, in the lefse she taught her daughter to make, in the books by her bed. It was in the way she looked at people: with depth, not surface. It was in her posture: straight-backed, like her grandmother’s.

She thought: To be Norwegian in America is to carry forward something that no longer exists where you came from—but is needed where you are.

And that’s what she did. Every day. Without words. But with everything she was.

Memory

She and her granddaughter stood on a hill on the opposite side of the fjord from Balestrand. It was late summer, and the air was as clear as only Norwegian fjord air can be. The seven churches could be glimpsed in the distance—just as she remembered them from the stories about her mother’s farm.

The granddaughter held her hand. A girl of eleven, with the same dark eyes as her father, but something in her smile that reminded Bertha of a younger version of herself. She looked at the child and at the same time looked back at the life she had lived—a long canvas of quiet, strength, departures, and new roots.

“This is where I grew up,” she said softly. “This is where it all began.”

The girl nodded but said nothing. Some things don’t need words.

She had returned before—but never like this. Never with someone she could point forward with. They had traveled from Seattle, across the ocean, and farther inland. And now they stood here—she with a body that ached, but a heart at peace.

She walked down the path, slowly. Step by step toward the old house. It was still standing, even though the roof was new and the garden no longer bore signs of her grandmother’s beds. But the basement still smelled of wood. She bent down and placed her hand on an old bench. A mark there—a scratch, perhaps from a child’s hand once helping. She smiled.

In church, she didn’t sing. She simply sat, hands in her lap, while the hymns echoed through the walls. Some she recognized. Others had come later. And she thought: it doesn’t have to be the same to be sacred.

Her granddaughter wanted to be a musician, she’d said. To work with sound, she said. And Bertha had nodded. Sound is memory too. Sound is roots.

Later that day, as they stood by the fjord and looked out across the open water, the girl asked:

“Grandma, did you miss this place?”

Bertha didn’t answer right away. She looked out. At the light dancing over the waves. At the old hotel. At the little island.

“I carried it with me,” she said at last. “Every single day. But I belong where you are. In the country we built ourselves.”

And she knew then, with a calm she’d never had before: she wasn’t just from one country. She belonged to both. And between the two, she had become herself.

She turned. Walked up from the fjord with her granddaughter hand in hand. The fjord remained behind. But she didn’t need to hold on anymore.

She carried it inside her. And that was enough.

_{Bertha Sylliaasen (born Bertha Sande, 1888–1992) was born in Balestrand, Sogn og Fjordane, Norway, on May 2, 1888, the daughter of woodcarver Johannes Sande and Kari Ruud. After her mother’s death, she was raised by her grandmother. Bertha received a relatively privileged education for a girl from a rural area, attending primary school, lower secondary school (realskole), and middle school, where she studied English.}

_{In 1906, she emigrated—against her will—with her father, stepmother, and half-siblings to Bellingham, Washington. There she worked as a housemaid, first in private homes and later in Seattle. She developed strong English skills, found access to Norwegian literature through the public library, and took evening classes.}

_{In Seattle, she met her future husband through the church choir. They had one child and lived in both Seattle and Memphis at different points in their lives. Bertha never held official positions within the Norwegian-American community but was active in women’s groups and choir work. Later in life, she returned to her hometown with her granddaughter.}

_{Source: Carr, I. N. (Interviewer). (April 4, 1983). Interview with Bertha Sylliaasen [Audio recording, transcript, and photograph]. Pacific Lutheran University, Archives and Special Collections, Box 11, Folder 1. Transcribed by M. S. Gee, J. Peterson, and B. Husby. Coded by K. Ringdahl and A. Smetzler.}

_{Cover Image: Student reading to two little girls. Photographed for 1920 home economics catalog by Troy. Collection: Human Ecology Historical Photographs}

‍