The Pastor's Wife

The First Christmas

It was three o’clock in the afternoon when he left. A pale, blue-gray light lay over the snow, and the sky had the same cold countenance as his face when he stood in the doorway and said there was no other way. The pastor had to go.

She stood there with the door slightly ajar. The cold cut in like an invisible claw, and she didn’t know whether to hold onto the door handle or the youngest girl clinging to her skirt.
“We’re alone now,” she whispered, but the girl didn’t hear. She was already sitting on the floor, pulling at the little doll they had made from an old wool sock.

It was Christmas Eve, and the wind moved through the walls like an animal. They had lit the stove, but the wood was green, and the flame flickered like a light in the wilderness.

She walked over to the window and looked out across the white plains. Alberta lay like a frozen land, forgotten by both God and people. Her husband was already on his way to a congregation farther out and she didn’t know whether he would return tomorrow, next week, or at all. It was a long ways away. Four congregations spread over one hundred miles.

Behind her lay the sleeping child. The other girl was still playing with the sock doll.

That’s when the memories came. Like snow sliding off a roof. Bergen, the ship, her sister.
She saw her sister in her mind’s eye, the way she had stood in the rain outside their uncle’s house in Haugesund, hair plastered to her forehead, eyes full of all the words they hadn’t said. They had waited for two years. Two long years for the war to release its grip. But the world had no time for girls who waited.

So they left. 1916. Two women on a ship, in a storm. They had brought what little they had: an embroidered apron, a dress she had started sewing in 1913, and the hope for something better.

Now she sat here. Three years later. In a house built by mission folk, with walls far too thin. An old upright piano stood in the corner, silent and cold. She didn’t sing anymore. Not out loud. But she carried a song within her, deep inside, like a kind of faith, a rhythm of something greater.She wrapped the girls in wool blankets and sat down by the stove. The flames died down, but she didn’t move.

“Dear God,” she said softly, “if you can hear me – bring him home safely. And give me a strength I didn’t know existed.”

The snow settled like a new white dream outside the windows. She knew it already then – this was a Christmas she would never forget.

Across the Ocean

It felt as if the world had tilted—everything safe in life slipping backward, and ahead lay only the unknown, the open sea, and the smell of rust, salt, and oily grime. Bergensfjord sat heavy in the water, loaded with people who didn’t quite know if they were fleeing from something or toward something. She stood by the railing with her arms around her sister. They hadn’t said much since the ship left the dock. They didn’t need to. Everything had already been said during the two years they’d waited—with suitcases packed, with goodbyes that never found peace.

It started calmly, like a gray breath. But when they reached open waters, the waves rose like mountains. People tumbled through the corridors, plates shattered against the floor, and she had to hold on tight not to lose her footing.

The seasickness came like an enemy she couldn’t fight off. She lay in her bunk with her face turned to the wall, while her stomach churned in rhythm with the boat. Her sister sat beside her, stroking her forehead, but it didn’t help. There was no rest, no night or day, only this shifting rhythm of lurching, creaking, and nausea.

There was an old woman from Nordfjord who prayed out loud every night. She said the Lord had a plan. But she couldn’t pray herself. She didn’t know what to say.

One morning she woke, and everything was still. The storm had passed, and the ocean lay like a sheet of silver across the world. She went up on deck and looked back. Nothing. Only water. Norway was gone. Everything she had known was now beneath the horizon.

Her sister stood beside her. Her skin was pale, but her eyes were clear. They didn’t speak. But her sister took her hand and held it tight, as if she knew this moment would burn itself into memory: the last morning when the past could still shimmer in the crest of a wave.

She felt something in her chest—heavy and solid: this was the way. There was no home anymore. Only sea and the courage to move forward.

The Calling

It was a quiet snowfall the day she saw him for the first time. He came walking across the seminary yard with a stack of books in his arms, snowflakes in his hair, and an expression on his face as if he carried more than books—as if he carried a message.

She stood in the doorway to the reading room, a cloth in her hands, just having wiped down the tables after the evening gathering. There was something in the way he looked up—as if he believed she was the one he had come to meet. That’s not something you think right away, but the thought planted itself nonetheless.

His name was Olaf Kristianson Blomelie, from a farm beneath the mountains up north. New to America, like herself, but with a dream rooted deep. He was going to be a pastor. He knew that, and he bore that knowledge with reassuring weight. She had never met a man who carried himself like that, as if the future were a cross he wasn’t afraid to bear.

They began meeting in the reading room, in the chapel, in the kitchen where she helped out. He didn’t ask many questions, but when he did speak, his words stuck.

“You have a calm in you,” he said once, “that doesn’t come from this world.”

She didn’t know how to respond. But she felt seen. For the first time since they left the dock in Bergen, she felt that someone truly saw her—not just as a sister, not as a housekeeper, but as a person.

They married on an autumn day in 1919. Leaves fell from the trees like little golden promises. She didn’t wear a silk dress, just a simple outfit she had sewn herself, with pearls from Norway stitched into the bodice. In the church sat friends from the seminary and children who didn’t fully understand what was happening—but clapped anyway.

They lived for a while in Minneapolis. Everything seemed possible then. He read the Psalms aloud in the evenings, and she cooked and sang with the girls at the orphanage where she worked.

But it didn’t last long. The following spring, the letter came. The call from Alberta. A mission field, four churches, vast distances and few souls. They said they needed a strong pastor—and an even stronger pastor’s wife.

She looked at him as he read the letter. He smiled, as if God himself had placed it in his hands. She smiled too, but something inside her tightened. She looked out the window, saw the snow lying like a promise on the ground, and suddenly felt the dream-bridge they had been walking on begin to creak at the joints.

But she said yes. Of course she said yes.

She believed then that faith and love would be enough. She believed it was enough to be two who carried the calling together.

She didn’t yet know what cold could do to faith.

Loss and Dreams

It was raining the day they came back from the conference. It had been raining for weeks. She felt it already at the station—the heavy air, the dark edge of clouds that wouldn’t let go. When they stepped off the train in South Bend, Olaf didn’t say anything. He just looked at her, as if he knew before she did.

When they got to the house, the water had already made its way inside. Floodwater had come from the river, like a hand of wrath. Everything was falling apart: mattresses floating, photos slipping from their frames, hymnals turned into lumps of sorrow. She moved through the rooms like a sleepwalker. Seemingly calm. But inside, something broke.

This was their third move in nine years. And now she knew: they couldn’t stay. People here didn’t care. They didn’t see the light in the church; they didn’t hear the words. She was exhausted from being the one carrying faith for two.

They moved to Tacoma, to a small house near the railroad tracks. He had received a new call there. But she could see it in him: his body couldn’t carry any more. He had grown thin, his face sharper, his eyes more distant. He still preached, yes, but something in him had begun to unravel.

Then one day, in February 1968, he was gone. It happened quietly. He had been ill for a long time, but still—when it comes, death is always sudden.

She sat by his bed in those final nights. Held his hand, the one that had once carried hymnals and winter firewood. There were no grand words. Just one last look.

Afterward, the house was quiet. Far too quiet. She sold it and moved to an apartment in University House. She moved in on New Year’s Eve. Snow lay like a white blanket over the street, and she carried with her a chest of old things: an embroidered apron, a photo from Bergen, and a scrap of her wedding veil.

She was old now. She knew it. But not broken by age. She had traveled, endured, lost, been alone—but never fully defeated.

And the girls—yes, they managed. All four of them.

One played the organ in a church in Portland. Another worked in a bank, with determination in her eyes and order in her papers. The third lived in Tacoma—the careful one, always. And the fourth had become a nurse, with warm hands and clear answers. They were her life’s work. They were her song of triumph.

But in the evenings, when darkness crept across the apartment and the wind brushed the window like a distant hand, she could still feel that old ache in her chest—the same as when the ship left Bergen:

She had never looked back. But there were still dreams she carried with her.
Dreams of mountains, of her sister, of the song that never ceased.

Homecoming

It was 1968—fifty years later. She had never seen it coming, but one day, there she stood with a plane ticket in her hand. A single seat with a group tour, departure date written in blue ballpoint pen, and her name—Nellie Blomelie—spelled the American way.

She had never been in the air before. But she wasn’t afraid. She had already seen the sea turn, seen houses go under, seen life shift direction with a single letter. A plane was just a new way to cross the world.

They landed in Oslo on an early morning in July. The air was cleaner than she remembered, green and filled with scents she couldn’t quite name. She continued by train, then by bus, and finally by taxi. When she stepped out, she stood on a hillside with a view of Aga. The old house was gone, but the landscape—the fjord, the birch trees, the sloping fields—stood just as it had before.

She stepped into the grass as if trying to remember what it had felt like to be a child. A shiver went through her. She looked around, and the tears rose—unashamed.

On the mountain pasture behind the farm, she stood alone, wearing the pastor’s wife outfit she had finished embroidering many years before. The pearls glinted faintly in the sunlight, the bodice clung to her chest, and she didn’t feel old as she stood there—only filled with a life that had been lived.

She thought of her sister. Of all the people she never got to say goodbye to. Of Olaf. Of that first Christmas in Alberta. And of the children—now women with lives of their own, with their own answers.

She placed a hand over her heart and whispered to herself:
“I never came home—but I carried home with me.”

And she knew then: it was no longer a question of belonging to a place. She had become her own home. A wanderer with roots in more than one country, a body full of memory, a heart with room for more than one landscape.

Norway welcomed her with open arms that summer. Relatives came driving, old friends met her at the dock, and in Haugesund she heard a sister’s laughter she thought she had forgotten.

But when she returned to America five weeks later, it was without sorrow. For what she needed, she had found—and what she had carried through storm and cold would live on in those who came after.

She sat in the airplane seat and watched the clouds open. A white world, and below: two homes now resting side by side within her.

_{Biography:
Nellie Blomelie (1893–1981)
Nellie Blomelie (née Johanneson) was born April 12, 1893, in Aga, Hardanger. She emigrated to America in 1916, after her mother and six siblings had left in 1914. In Minneapolis, she met Olaf Blomelie, and they married in 1919. Together, they served in mission churches across Alberta, North Dakota, Vancouver, and Washington. They had four daughters.}

_{After her husband’s death in 1968, Nellie moved to University House in Tacoma. That same year, she returned to Norway for the first time since emigrating. Throughout her life, she held fast to traditional Norwegian foods and folk costume for holidays.}

_{Source:
Blomelie, N. (1978, April 21). Oral interview / interviewed by I. N. Carr. Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Collection, Pacific Lutheran University.}

_{Cover Image: Unknown. Norwegian American Historical Association, Archives}

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