A Seed in Foreign Soil

Prologue

Sigurda sat with her back straight. Her hands rested in her lap, light and brown like withered leaves. The house was quiet—the kind of quiet that settles in a room that has been filled with many voices. The kitchen clock ticked steadily, and outside the window stood an apple tree, its branches bowed with ripened apples, the harvest long overdue.

“You came all the way from Norway?” she asked, smiling slightly, a little crookedly.

The young woman nodded, pulled off her scarf, and smiled back. She carried a notebook, a recorder, and a kind of solemnity in her gaze. As if she knew that here, in this ordinary house with yellow curtains and the smell of cinnamon, there was a story she would never forget.

Sigurda got up and put the kettle on. Her movements were slow, but steady. “I make coffee the old-fashioned way,” she said. “You’ll have to forgive me if it’s not modern enough.”

The young woman laughed. “I think that’s exactly what I need,” she replied.

Sigurda sat down again. She stared out at the tree, the one she and Olaf had planted when they finally made themselves a garden.

“You want to know what it was like?” she asked quietly. “What it cost us—and who we were, before we became the ones who built all this without being remembered for it?”

The woman nodded.

Sigurda sighed. She leaned back in the chair and placed her hands in her lap, as if to gather something from deep within.

“I’ve been a maid. A mother. A waitress. An artist. A janitor.” She tugged at a fold in her skirt. “Yes, I’ve been many things. Everything but a passenger.”

She turned, smiling faintly, her voice carrying both laughter and sorrow:
“I always had to row.”

Roots

I remember the hands first. My mother’s. Broad, rough, smelling of oil and sardine brine. They folded linens and wiped away tears with the same calm. She didn’t say much, but when she did, her words stuck.

Her father was gone before she could even remember him. She had one memory, maybe imagined: a brown leather vest and a face behind the sunlight. That was it. He died while the youngest girl was still nursing. Mother was left with three daughters, a patch of land, and a gaze that never asked for anything.

They lived in Os, close to the fjord. A white house with slanted floors and a wood stove on every level. The roof leaked when the rain came down hard, and the living room windows rattled in the storm. But they had each other. And they had a mother who never complained.

“The world owes us nothing,” she said once, when the pastor offered help. “We’ve got backbone.”

Sigurda delivered the mail when she was ten. Carried flour sacks home from the store. Scrubbed stairs for old ladies who smoked indoors and spoke down to her, but still left five øre on the sideboard. Her mother never said she had to, but it was as if the very walls whispered it: here, everyone helps.

It was the fjord that became her refuge. The grownups didn’t think she’d dare. The boys on the dock laughed. “No girl can swim that far,” one said, tossing a stone into the water.

But she didn’t answer. She laid aside her dress, tied her braid with a strap, and dipped her body into the ice-cold blue water.

Silence. A pull across her chest. A rhythm in her arms. She didn’t know what she was swimming toward—only that she couldn’t stop. She crossed the strait that day. Stood on the other side, naked and trembling, the whole village at her back.

She knew then, without having words for it: it wasn’t just water she had crossed. It was something else. Something waiting further ahead.

To Leave or to Stay – and What It Costs

There was a man in a coat, well-educated, who wanted to help. He had seen Sigurda in the classroom, seen how easily she read, how she could answer before the others had even begun. One day, he said it plainly: “You could become something, Sigurda. A teacher, maybe. Or more.”

She didn’t quite believe him, but she carried his words home. Told her mother—part proud, part scared. Her mother sat with her hands in her lap and answered as she always did, calmly:
“We don’t ask for help. We never have. And we won’t now.”

And that was that. There was no school beyond the village school. There was work. Cleaning, childcare, stair scrubbing, the fish factory. But the thought didn’t let go: she wanted out.

In secret, she flipped through maps. Australia. The word tasted like wind in her hair, like a future without the smell of linens and a broken back. She didn’t quite know what it was that pulled her—only that something pressed from within.

But then she fell in love with a man who had strong hands and big dreams. He spoke of America, of opportunity, of work. She thought maybe one dream could be traded for another. A different ocean, same direction.

They married, and shortly after, Robert was born. Three months later, they stood on the dock in Bergen. It was December, and the cold bit through everything.

Her mother stood a little ways off. She hadn’t said much. Had packed wool into the suitcase, added a photo, a small hand-knit cap for the boy.

She didn’t say goodbye. She just nodded, and her eyes were empty.

Sigurda held Robert tightly to her chest. Her husband stood by the luggage, smoking. Sigurda knew this was a break that could not be mended with letters and packages.

They boarded the Bergensfjord. The cabin was cramped and damp, and the bed creaked like it carried the sorrow of everyone who had lain there before.

The first night, a storm broke out. Plates flew in the dining hall, women vomited into paper bags, babies screamed. Robert slept through it all, tucked close to her, as if he knew his mother would hold on even if the world came apart.

She sat with her back against the wall and sang without sound. What she sang, she couldn’t remember. Maybe it was just breath and rhythm.

The fjord had taught her how to swim. Now she was crossing an ocean. And she knew: it would be days before she saw land again.

Crossing and Passage

Everything was white. The walls, the floor, the doctors’ coats. The light came from above—harsh and cold—and washed the faces pale. Sigurda didn’t understand what they were saying, but she understood the tone. They could send you back. A single mark on the skin, one cough too many, and you’d be handed a red tag instead of a white one.

She stood with Robert in her arms. He was awake, but quiet. As if he, too, sensed that something was at stake.

Her husband answered the questions. Sigurda just nodded. A couple of times, she said “yes.” It was the only word she was sure wouldn’t betray her.

A woman in uniform took the child and weighed him. Sigurda tensed, held her breath. What if he didn’t weigh enough? What if he was too pale?

An older doctor with a steel comb and a thin mouth examined his eyes, throat, hands. Scribbled something in a book. The woman with the scale nodded. Sigurda was handed a white slip.

“Approved,” she said. And her smile wasn’t cold—just hurried.

Sigurda whispered a thank-you, though the words barely came.

They were led into a room with iron beds and woolen blankets. She laid Robert in a basket beside the bed, pulled a wool cover over him. He fell asleep almost immediately. She lay down fully dressed. Felt the springs press against her back—and stopped thinking.

She slept. For the first time since Bergen.

She woke up in a different body. As if something had let go, and something else had taken hold. An anchor, maybe.

She sat for a long time staring out the window. There was no fjord out there. Just cranes and harbor lines. People running in all directions, speaking a language she didn’t understand.

Once, she thought she heard them say her name. But it was another Sigurda. Another dream.

She had nothing more with her than what she could carry. But she had her son. And a white slip of paper that said she could go on.

And she knew: this was the beginning.

A Woman in an Attic Room

The room was small and hot. A slanted ceiling, a narrow bed with a broken mattress, a little table with a lamp that hummed faintly. It was her room. Her attic. And her working days that started before the sun rose and ended only when everyone else was asleep.

The family lived in a big house with shiny tiled floors and stairways that echoed with high heels, children’s footsteps, and closed doors.

The lady of the house called her “Sigret.” The children said nothing—just threw clothes on the floor and shouted when they needed something. The men came and went, polite but rarely speaking to her.

Sigurda got up before anyone else. The stove pots had to shine, the kitchen scrubbed, the bread baked. They served her eggs and ham, but she barely knew how to hold the utensils. Everything was different: the food, the rhythm, the things you were expected to know without being told.

One day she mistook the sugar for the salt and made the entire dinner table wrinkle their noses. The lady didn’t say a word, but washed the plates with quick, practiced hands.

She thought of her mother. How she had managed everything without ever complaining. Now it was her turn. But she hadn’t known what it cost to be strong until was there herself—with hands that never got to rest, and a son who called another woman “mama.”

Letters from her husband came less often. Short, without warmth. “Nothing today either.” “Talked to a Norwegian, maybe a job next week.”

She didn’t always write back. She didn’t know what to say, and the things she really needed to tell him wouldn’t fit in a letter.

And she didn’t write home. What could she write? That she scrubbed someone else’s kitchen with tears in her throat and sang quietly to herself at night?

No. She carried it. Polished silverware. Ironed sheets. Grieved silently. And held it in.

​​The Loss of Language – and Her Child

It came as a small, white envelope in the mailbox. The paper was thin, the lines machine-typed, but the words pierced through like nails:

"We recommend that you speak English at home. It will help your child succeed."

She read it several times—first slowly, then faster, as if speed could change the meaning. But the message stayed the same. And she understood, beneath the formal phrasing, that the Norwegian language was now seen as an obstacle to her child.

Sigurda folded the letter and placed it in the nightstand drawer. She didn’t say anything to her sister. But that same evening, when Robert came running and called “Mama” to the other woman, she didn’t answer with her usual: “Kva vil du, guten min?”

She said, “What do you need?”

The words didn’t taste bitter—just foreign. But that wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was that the boy didn’t notice the difference. He just smiled and pointed to his toy car.

The days passed. She spoke less and less Norwegian to him. It was easier to follow the advice than she had expected. And each time she did, she felt something slipping further away.

Robert called her sister “Mom” when speaking to others. It stung, but Sigurda said nothing. What could she say? That she couldn’t give him dinner, warmth, the rhythm of daily life? That she scrubbed her way through the nights and only got to hold him on weekends?

One Sunday, they sat on a bench in the park. He sang a children’s song in English. She recognized the melody from her own childhood, but the words were new, smooth, without the scent of fjords and pine. She tried to hum along, but he stopped her and said, “That’s not how it goes.”

That’s when she knew. She had lost something. Maybe not the boy himself, but the bond between them—the invisible thread of feeling, sound, and memory.

She sat there for a long time. Felt his breath against her sleeve. He was hers—but not entirely.

That night, when he had fallen asleep, she lay down beside his bed and whispered a poem in Norwegian. Not so he would remember it—but so that she wouldn’t forget.

She couldn’t reclaim what had slipped through her fingers. But she could hold on to what she still had. And rise again.

And that’s what she did.

The Courage to Build

It began in a basement. A janitor’s room with a concrete floor and a lightbulb swinging in the draft. But she got the keys. And a paycheck.

She knew how to fix a leaking faucet, how to shovel snow, and how to respond when people stormed in and shouted for help. It wasn’t a glamorous job. But it was hers. And no one could call her a maid anymore.

The marriage was over. No drama, no scandal. Just a silence that had settled deep between their sentences. Her husband faded out of her life. She didn’t cry. She simply cleared away the cups and moved on.

It was during that time she met Olaf. One day he stopped by the building where she worked and asked about firewood. He had a West Norwegian dialect and eyes that smiled before his lips did.

He didn’t ask what she had done before—only what she liked to do.

They sat on a park bench one Sunday, sharing a thermos of coffee. He talked about woodworking and mountains. She told him about her sister, her boy, and how she could sew everything from bedspreads to evening gowns.

“Bunads,” she said, almost to herself. “I can sew bunads.”

And so she did. Evenings, nights, weekends. With needle and thread and eyes burning from fatigue, she embroidered roses and vine patterns people were happy to pay for. One garment could take weeks. But she saved the money. A quarter at a time.

Olaf helped. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, and he wasn’t afraid to let her shine. “We’re building something together,” he said. And they did.

In 1938, they signed the papers. A house of their own, with white trim and a patch of garden out back. Sigurda stood in the doorway, holding the key as if it were something sacred. She knew then:

She had arrived. Not in a country. But in a place that was hers.

Back to Os

She didn’t quite know why she was going. It was Olaf who’d said it, one evening as they sat with the map spread out across the table:
“You should see it again. Before it disappears.”

And so she went. In 1955, twenty-six years after she left Norway, she stepped off the train in Bergen, took the ferry across the fjord, and stood one morning outside the house where she grew up. She held a suitcase in one hand and a small package in the other. Her heart was beating in a way it hadn’t in years.

Everything was smaller. The road, the mountain, the fjord. The house leaned a little; the paint was peeling. She recognized the stone by the front door, but it sat lower now, as if the ground beneath it had sunk.

Her mother was gone. She knew that, of course, but it was something else to stand in the doorway and look into a room without a familiar face. A new couple lived there now. They’d hung curtains with flowers on them.

She ran up the hills like a child. Sat by the brook where she used to wash her doll’s clothes. But it felt like walking through a stage set, as if the landscape remembered her, not the other way around.

An old classmate recognized her at the store.
“Sigurda? You came back?”

Yes, she came back. But not home. She talked with them, smiled, told them about Tacoma and the garden and the boy who was grown now. But she felt it the whole time: she had become a guest. She no longer knew where the buses went or who owned the farms anymore. Her accent had softened, and the words she used made them smile—kindly, but still.

That last evening she sat on the dock with her legs dangling over the edge. She stared out at the same sound she once swam across as a child. The tears came suddenly. She carried a sorrow, she felt it clearly—a sorrow over belonging to two countries, and the deepest pain now was knowing she no longer truly belonged in either.

What remained were the people she carried in her memory—forever.

A Place In Between

After she returned to America, she began to create again. Her hands had never rested for long, but now they found a new rhythm. Not just work, but shape and color. A kind of quiet reply.

She embroidered scenes she remembered from childhood. Forests in snow, mountains fading into bluish gray, a small white house by the fjord. She made a little book of poems she never read aloud, but one day the boy found it in a drawer and took it to school. The teacher called and said, “This is beautiful. Is it yours?”

She laughed, a little shy. “I only write so I won’t forget,” she said.

And that’s what she did. Remembered. Told stories. But not to complain. She told her son about the mountains and the strait, about the first time she swam across the water and no one thought she’d make it. She told him about the smell in the sardine factory, about the hills of Os, and her mother’s voice: “The world owes us nothing.”

He asked her once why she didn’t write it all down. She didn’t answer right away. She stepped out onto the porch, snapped a twig off a tree, and held it in her hand.

“Because I’d rather plant,” she finally said.

She got a neighbor to help her. In the garden, among the roses and strawberry plants, they dug a hole. She had saved seeds from an apple she’d received in Norway—a variety she remembered from childhood. A Gravenstein tree.

She crouched down, placed seed down into the soil, covered it over, and rose slowly. There was no ceremony. Just a seed, a thought, a beginning.

It didn’t grow right away. But she knew: the most important things grow in secret—quietly, slowly, out of sight. There is a place in between, she thought. A space where nothing seems to move, yet everything is quietly taking root. In what we make with our own hands, in what we pass on without asking for anything in return. In those quiet, patient ways, we sow the seeds of a home.

Epilogue – A Seed Germinates

Time had passed as it always does in an old house where stories are told. The coffee pot was empty, shadows stretched long across the kitchen floor, and the recorder ticked with a steady, quiet rhythm. The young woman sat with her notebook closed in her lap, and she knew that everything she needed—all the insight she had come to find— was to be found between the unspoken words.

Because what she had heard wasn’t an ordinary life story. Not just a tale of leaving one country for another, from one winter into a new spring. It was a story of carrying something larger than oneself—and doing it without seeking praise, without asking to be remembered in books.

Sigurda sat by the window, her hand resting in her lap, her eyes gazing far beyond the tree in the garden. Her fingers played with an embroidery, as if something within it could hold the memory—or offer an answer.

Then she spoke, softly:

“We didn’t get much.”

She waited, as if the words needed space.

“But we planted.”

The young woman looked up and met her gaze. In it lay certainty. A quiet faith.

“You just have to remember to water the tree,” Sigurda said. “Because what begins to grow won’t thrive on its own.”

_{About Sigurda Aamot
Sigurda Aamot (b. 1908 in Samnanger, Norway) emigrated to the United States in 1929 with her son, Robert. She settled in Tacoma, Washington, where her sister lived, and spent her first years working as a domestic servant before securing steady employment as a janitor. In 1936, she married Olaf Amot, and together they had two children.}

_{Alongside her work, she nurtured her passion for bunad sewing, poetry, and traditional Norwegian folk dance. She was active in the Daughters of Norway and taught Leikaring dance during major Norwegian celebrations. Sigurda was proud of her Norwegian heritage but also deeply devoted to her new country. She once said she would stand by the United States no matter what—even in the event of war with Norway.}

_{Source: Interview with Sigurda Aamot, Pacific Lutheran University Archives, 1981.}

_{Comer Image: Public domain photograph - Gustav Borgen studio, female portrait, the 1900s Norway, free to use, no copyright restrictions image}

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