The Myklebust Loom

There was smoke everywhere. A thick, salty mist that settled into her hair, her skin, her thoughts. Anna stood at the steel table, her hands in constant motion. The fish had to be threaded onto metal skewers—one by one—in the same rhythm, day after day. The motion lived in her wrists, not in her mind. Her thoughts were elsewhere.

She could feel how the smell of sardines and smoke had started to cling to her, like a second skin. She no longer knew if it was day or night outside—only that the factory routines dictated everything. As soon as they fired up the smoke ovens, a heavy, greasy vapor filled the air. She wasn’t the only Norwegian woman there, but she was the only one who remembered what it smelled like to slaughter the Christmas pig and hang lefse to dry above the stove.

Her hands kept working, but her mind was back by the river at home, where she had once washed her hands in the meltwater after helping in the lambing shed. She remembered the big loom in the parlor at the farm, and how her mother had taught her the colors, the rhythm, the patience of the thread. She had to close the door on that loom when she left. Too much. Too heavy. All she brought with her were the weaving knife and the reed. That was all.

She missed the way the spring sunlight would stream through the window, right onto the loom—not this artificial factory light that made everything look flat and yellow. She missed the way her mother sang as she wove: old hymns with delicate threads in the melody. Here, no one sang.

An American woman walked by and gave her a quick glance. Anna nodded. Smile. Always smile. But something was stuck inside her. The little handkerchief embroidered with her mother’s initials, which she kept in her dress pocket, had become her hidden altar. A memory. A comfort. A reminder.

She kept working. Three fish. A new skewer. The smell of smoke. But inside her, a different song hummed, woven into each day:
Don’t lose Jesus. Then your journey will become too costly.

The Last Christmas on the Farm‍

The frost roses clung thick to the windowpanes that morning. Anna woke to the scent of woodsmoke and baking. The parlor had been freshly scrubbed, floors washed, white rag rugs rolled out across the room. Her mother moved between the bakehouse and the main house with her dress hitched at the sides, her hair knotted tightly. She was like a queen this time of year. A workhorse in an apron, humming hymns.

It was little Christmas Eve, December 23,  and the holiday lingered in every corner of the farm. The lutefisk was soaking, the Christmas cookies lined up in the cellar chest. Lefse hung drying above the stove, and in the small back room, a sack of clementines and walnuts was tucked behind the old sewing cabinet.

Anna carried firewood and potatoes, fetched water from the spring, and helped polish the brass candleholders. She was nine that Christmas and still remembers how she and her sister each received a handmade dress with a lace collar. New stockings and shoes stood beside their beds. Mother always said everything should be new when the child in the manger arrived—clean body, clean clothes, clear thoughts.

The day before Christmas, she sang with her mother in the weaving room. Her mother sat at the loom; Anna perched on a stool, admiring the hands that worked without ever looking down. They sang:

"Behold, we come, Your lowly throng…"

The verses were woven into the thread. No clock was needed in that house—it was the rhythm of baking, weaving, and singing that told the time.

On Christmas Eve, the church bells rang in Rosendal. You could hear them all the way to Uskedalen, like an echo across the fjord. The family gathered. Mother read the Christmas gospel. Father—still alive then—rested his hands on the table and prayed. It was quiet. Quiet like snow falling on fresh tracks made during the night.

After dinner—lutefisk, rice porridge, and flatbread with butter and sugar—they sang around the tree. It was decorated with real candles, Norwegian flags, and homemade ornaments. Beneath it: small gifts, practical ones, but heartfelt.

That Christmas, Anna didn’t know it would be the last time she’d see her father read the Christmas story. But somehow she felt it—something sacred was in that room. She remembers how her mother smoothed her hair and said:

"Hold on to the song, Anna. And never forget the light in December."

She never did. As long as she lived, Anna sang the hymns. Always in a fresh apron, with clean hands and a pure heart.

Don’t Lose Jesus‍

It rained in Bergen. A quiet, heavy rain that soaked into your clothes and your bones. Anna stood with her hands curled around a coffee cup in the common room at the Mission Hotel. It was August 1914. Her suitcase stood by the door. It wasn’t big. But it was heavy. She had packed her weaving tools, a Bible, a silk scarf, and the small handkerchief embroidered with her mother’s initials.

She was twenty-one. Her father had passed. Her sister Brita was married in Norway, but the rest of her siblings were scattered across America. Her mother was left alone on the farm, sixty-six years old. It hadn’t been an easy decision to leave. But Knute needed help. His children needed someone. And it had always been Anna, her mother said, who understood people best.

When they hugged at the dock, tears welled in both their eyes, but neither let them fall. Her mother held her tight with both hands, thin and strong. She said it only once:

"Anna… don’t lose Jesus. Then your journey will become too costly."

Those words stayed with her.

She stood at the hotel window, looking out across the fjord. The clouds had parted slightly. A streak of light on the water. Her thoughts circled: childhood, the farm, the loom, church bells ringing across the fjord. She could feel them in her chest, like an echo she carried inside her.

She remembered the boat that once carried fruit from the farm to market in Bergen. Her father at the helm. Now she was leaving on a different journey. A great steamer, a coal-powered giant, bound for America.

She didn’t know if she’d ever return. She only knew she was going to help—and that she couldn’t let go of what carried her: her faith, her mother’s voice, what she held in her body, and what she had woven together from the threads of memories from home.

Later, when she stood on the deck as the ship pulled away from Bergen, she clutched her bag tightly. She looked back only for a moment. The mountains disappeared into mist and rain. But the words did not:

"Don’t lose Jesus. Then your journey will become too costly."

Childcare and Prayers

The first thing Anna remembered about Rosalia was the wind. A different sound than back home. Fewer mountains, more sky. “And if you don’t shake the tablecloth properly after a meal,” she would say later, “a fine layer of dry dust settles over everything.”

Knute was waiting at the station. The children stood silently behind his pantlegs. Anna smiled gently. She suddenly felt older than her twenty-one years. She wasn’t their mother—but now she had to be.

Their house was white and spacious, and inside there was the smell of American coffee, old Bibles, and a kind of grain she didn’t recognize from Norway. Inga, Knute’s wife, should have been there. But she was sick. Often in bed, barely speaking. Anna took care of everything—children, meals, laundry, the house.

She started learning English right away. They didn’t speak Norwegian here. The children wouldn’t learn it, and the neighbors didn’t understand it. She read labels on milk cartons and cooking instructions in old newspapers. She prayed in Norwegian, but soon began thinking in English. A mix of both.

The church was Congregational. They didn’t sing quite like back home. But Anna sat in the back and sang anyway. Same God, she thought. Just a different key. Eventually, she learned to communicate with the pastor’s wife, and picked up what things were called: “dough,” “baking soda,” “oven.”

It was Christmas before she knew it. Anna decided they would have a Norwegian Christmas. Lutefisk. Lefse. Rice pudding. She found an old rolling pin in a drawer and a brass candlestick in the cellar. She hung a hardanger-embroidered cloth on the wall and gathered some juniper twigs behind the house. It became a Christmas tree.

Knute didn’t say much. But he sat down and read the Christmas gospel. Anna read it silently to herself while carrying food to the table. The lutefisk didn’t taste quite like it did at home, but the children still sang around the tree. They sang American Christmas songs. She sang a Norwegian hymn softly inside. It wasn’t the same country, not the same tree. But the light was the same. And she hadn’t lost anything.

Not yet.

The Invisible Loom

The letter came on a Tuesday. She recognized it by its weight. By the handwriting. By the fact that nothing in the corner hinted at joy. She read it alone in the bedroom while the children played outside. Her mother had died.

It didn’t say much—just that she had passed peacefully, with a smile on her lips, that a few people from the prayer house had been present. Anna sat for a long time with the pale paper, as if she might find a hand between the lines, or a verse, or a face. But the paper was silent.

After that, the days felt different. She didn’t cry much—there wasn’t time. But it was as though something settled beneath her skin, a kind of unease with no comfort. She began to feel how much of her mother lived in every movement she made: the way she washed a floor, shaped dough, folded linens, sang the evening prayer with the children.

The loom had been dismantled to make room for a hospital bed. Her mother had written that in one of the letters. “It’s in pieces now,” her sister Brita had said. But no one had the heart to throw it away. Anna had dreamed of having it sent to her. But that never happened. She knew she didn’t need it.

She had started weaving in her mind. In the evenings, when everything was quiet, she’d recall the threads—fine ones and coarse—how they wrapped and turned. She felt it in her hands, hands that couldn’t work but still remembered. She wove memories. She wove her mother’s voice. She wove a bridge between her old life and the new one.

It was as if she carried an invisible loom with her—one that needed no space or floor, only a memory book in her heart. When she smoothed a crease in an apron, it was as though she were following an old pattern. Her mother’s pattern. And one step at a time, she began to believe it was enough.

A loom didn’t need to stand in the living room for the threads to keep her together.

The Woman in the Store‍

Anna stood behind the counter with a calm in her body that came from routine. She had worked in a store long enough to know the rhythm: customers in, goods out, smile, change, and a short chat about the weather or Sunday service. In Rosalia, she had been a housemaid, but in Moscow, Idaho, she stood on her own for the first time. A domestic position with a wealthy family who owned a large department store—six floors of luxury she had only seen in newspapers.

She cleaned, tended fires, cared for the children. None of that was new. But something was different: the rhythm of the household was American. Everything was strictly organized, systematized, efficient. She started making lists. The old kitchen routines from home got new names and new clothes, but she knew where the roots were.

It was there, between shelves and homemade confections, that she met John Ray Tobiason. He worked at the store. A quiet man, but with warmth in his eyes. He was the brother of Inga, her sister-in-law, and they had known each other before. But something changed now. Maybe it was because she finally felt at home in this new rhythm of life—or because he had the same calm and steadiness she remembered from back home.

He served during the war but stayed stateside. They waited. Wrote letters. Prayed. And when he returned in 1919, they both knew. There was no big wedding. No parents, no cake. But there was prayer. There was a quiet yes. Dr. Nase in Tacoma officiated. Her brother Tormod received the news via telegram. His reply read: "Hope your future is as quiet as your wedding."

Anna worked during their first year of marriage. They rented a small stucco house in Longview. She sewed her own curtains, found a Bible with large print, and planted sugar peas in the backyard. It was a simple life. But it was theirs. And in everything—from buying milk to the evening hymn—a quiet thread of gratitude wove through.

Faith wasn’t something they spoke much about. It was something they lived. In their work. In their service. In the store never opening on Sundays. In the prayer before meals. In how she still knew what day it was—not from the calendar, but from which hymn kept echoing in her mind.

Christmas With the Grandchildren‍‍

The smell of cinnamon and melted butter hit you long before you walked through the door. The grandchildren knew: it was Christmas baking time at Grandma Anna’s. They kicked off their winter boots and ran in with red cheeks and eyes full of excitement.

Anna stood at the kitchen counter, apron over her knit dress, flour in her hair. Her hands moved with a rhythm deeper than memory. She shaped the dough for Christmas cookies the way her mother once had. The lefse roller and rolling pin were a Norwegian inheritance in an American kitchen.

“Come help me,” she’d say, handing each grandchild a small piece of dough.
They giggled, dusted each other with flour, and Anna sang. Old verses, hymns. Sometimes she just hummed, but the children always asked for the words.

“What’s the song about, Grandma?”
“About light in the darkness,” she said. “About someone who’s coming. About how we don’t have to be afraid.”

And as the lefse was being made and then sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, Anna told them about the farm in Uskedalen. About the river that sang in spring, the church bells from Rosendal, and her mother who always had clean clothes ready for Christmas. She pointed to the hardanger embroidery on the wall and said, “See that? I made it when I was fourteen.” She taught them to look closely, to notice the patterns and colors.

They always read the Christmas gospel together. Anna prayed in Norwegian while the grandchildren closed their eyes and listened. It was foreign—but familiar. The language was different, but the tone was like a lullaby.

She always said: “Every lefse is a memory book. It carries all the hands that have touched the dough before you. You carry it on when you bake.”
And the grandchildren knew. They knew that inside every Christmas cookie was a song, a whispered prayer, and a piece of something not meant to be forgotten. Something that melted on the tongue—but stayed in the heart.

The Myklebust Loom

It was December in Bergen. Snow crept along the street corners, and the light from shop windows shone like stars in the clouds of cold air breathed out by passersby.  Julie clutched her coat tightly and turned in toward the entrance of the Mission Hotel. She had been working there for three weeks—doing dishes, laundry, manning the front desk. The old hallways carried more than just dirty sheets and coffee cups—they carried memories. And one of those memories was her own grandmother, Anna.

Anna had stayed here one night in August 1914. She had looked out over the same fjord, with the same worry in her stomach. Julie knew it—because she had read the letter. The one that ended with: “Don’t lose Jesus. Then your journey will be costly.”

Today, Julie was traveling, she had been invited to celebrate Christmas with a relative who still lived on the farm in Uskedalen. She didn’t know what to expect. She had only seen old photographs, heard her grandmother’s voice speak of the river, the loom, the church bells.

The landscape opened up—fjords, snow, glittering ice. She sat and read from Psalms, just like her grandmother had. She sang softly: Lo, how a rose e’er blooming...

In the living room in Uskedalen, candles flickered. The old hardanger embroidery hung on the wall. An elderly man greeted her, his words carrying the gentle weight of belonging. And when she entered the small room, the loom was there. Large. Steady. Its threads stretched across the beam like a quiet bridge.

Julie placed her hand on the wood. It was warm. She felt a quiet grow inside her—like someone was whispering without using words.

The next day, she made lefse with the others. She told them about Anna. About the Christmas cookies. About the songs. About the prayers spoken in Norwegian. They listened, laughed, sang along. And she knew she was carrying it forward.

Because every lefse, every stitch, every hymn and every story—it wasn’t just a tale. It was a loom. And Julie had caught the thread.

The story lived on. And the circle wasn’t finished—it had been tied together.
The Myklebust loom held strong.

_{Biography:
Anna Myklebust Tobiason (1892–1992) was born in Uskedalen, Norway, and emigrated to the United States at age 21 to help her brother care for his children in Rosalia, Washington. She later worked as a store clerk and housekeeper in Idaho, where she met and married John Raymond Tobiason. Together they ran a grocery store in Longview for 29 years before relocating to Tacoma.}

_{Anna was deeply involved in church life and held several leadership roles in the Lutheran church. She remained committed to her Norwegian traditions and stayed in contact with family in Norway throughout her life.}

_{Source: Tobiason, A. (1981, November 19). Interview in Tacoma, Washington. PLU.}

_{Cover Image: Weaving woolen blankets on a primitive hand loom, Telemarken, Norway. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.}

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