A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France

Copyright © Janet Hulstrand 2022. All rights reserved.

Winged Words Publishing

An imprint of BookBaby

www.janethulstrand.com

Library of Congress Control Number 2022922001

Print ISBN: 978-1-66787-918-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-66787-919-2

First Edition

Printed in the United States of America

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including photocopying, recording, or any other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission or information about this book contact: [email protected]

or Winged Words Publishing, 1999 Bordner Place, St. Paul, MN 55116

There are a number of brief quotations from literary works and newspapers in this book.

All of the sources have been credited in the back matter, along with the photography credits.

For Effie Sanborn Powers and Carolyn Powers Hulstrand

Who shared their love of reading with me,

my siblings, and my cousins:

What a gift their passion for stories,

and for the written word, was to all of us!

Preface

My grandmother grew up around the turn of the twentieth century, in a very small town in the northeastern corner of Iowa. Her formal education ended in the eighth grade, but she always loved to read and write, and she shared this love with her children and grandchildren. She had various jobs both before and after she was married—as a clerk in a jewelry store, a telephone operator, a milliner’s assistant, a gift-wrapper in a department store—but for most of her life she worked as a farmer’s wife.

My mother grew up on that farm, in northwestern Wisconsin, during the Depression. After high school she went to nursing school in Red Wing, Minnesota, and later she graduated from the University of Minnesota. She too loved to read and write: all her life she tried to write for publication, with little success. After she died, among her papers I found numerous rejections from various magazines, and just one short essay published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune—it was about her notoriously bad sense of direction.

In the early 1990s, while going through my mother’s papers, I found a few pages from my grandmother’s journal, written in 1931. These pages gave me such a vivid peek into her life as a young mother during the Depression that I wanted to find more. I set out on a determined search to find the rest of her journals, which I was pretty sure might be hiding somewhere in my parents’ home, in the many boxes of such things my mother had saved.

It has been nearly thirty years since I first began that search—not only for my grandmother’s journals, but for my grandmother herself, for an understanding of who she really was. For although I now credit her indirectly for the passion for reading and writing that has made me who I am and has fueled my life’s journey, I never felt close to her when she was alive.

Many things have changed in those thirty years. I became a mother; I survived the breakup of my marriage; I moved to France and grew—one might even say blossomed—into a new stage in my life.

While I never did find the journals I so hoped to find—or at least I haven’t found them yet—I found a great deal of material that has helped me sketch out as much detail about my grandmother’s life, and my mother’s, as I can.

Their love of storytelling prepared the way for me to live the adventurous, writerly life I have been fortunate to live. It is their passion for reading, writing, and travel that provided the wind for my sails, a wind that has taken me a long way from Iowa, and from Minnesota, where I grew up.

This, then, is both their story and mine.

Janet Hulstrand

Essoyes (Aube) France

November 2022

Contents

Preface

Note to the Reader

Prologue

The Journey Begins: Back to Bonair

Effie Sanborn Powers (1892-1985)

A Little Town Called Bonair

On the Banks of the Mississippi

The Lonesome Years

Carolyn Powers Hulstrand (1925-1990)

Carol Busybus Powers

Carolyn Powers, R.N.

A Hankering to See the World

It’s so nice being with you, Carol

Mothers and Daughters

To My Mom on Mother’s Day (1989)

Too Soon Gone

Changed, Changed Utterly

Janet Joy Hulstrand (1953-

My Mother, My First Editor

From St. Paul to Cincinnati

Being Swedish-American

Coon Rapids Senior High

Becoming Myself Again

The Problem of Sustenance

Into the Wider World

Essoyes in Champagne

Learning French

A Cheap Loft in the West Village

Ft. Greene, Brooklyn

Embracing the Dream

Stumbling Toward Fulfillment

The Second Part of Paris

Living in Our Nation’s Capital

Interludes Outside the Bubble

A Place to Call Our Own

Reclaiming the Roulotte

Return to Essoyes

Solitude without Loneliness

Epilogue

Living a Dream Deferred263

Acknowledgements

Credits

About the Author

Note to the Reader

This is a memoir, a literary form that tiptoes always—sometimes carefully, sometimes recklessly—along the fault line between fact and fiction. No one’s memory is perfect, and everyone has their unique slant on what happened at any particular time and place.

I have tried as hard as I can to be honest in this account. A few names have been changed, and certain details have been left out to protect the privacy of some individuals. However, most of the names of the people and places are real.

Prologue

The grandmother who inspired me to write this book is not the one I loved when I was growing up. In fact, it is painful—or is it just kind of embarrassing?—for me to admit it, but I never really liked this grandmother, the Iowa grandmother—my mother’s mother—when she was alive.

More precisely, I had figured out all on my own at about the age of ten that she didn’t like me, and had done the only thing I could think of in retaliation, which was to not like her back.

This was a sad secret I kept to myself, never daring or even wanting to share it with anyone who might’ve cared—my mother, my sister, or the pack of girl cousins I had grown up with, seven of us close in age, cousins almost as close as sisters, all of whom adored her.

She often gave me and my cousins matching birthday presents. One year she made us all gingham skirts, hand-embroidered in a cross-stitch pattern, in various colors. (Mine was the violet one, and I loved it.) But it was the present she had given me when I was nine or ten that convinced me deep down in my heart that she really didn’t like me.

That was the year she gave us the ceramic figurines: they were marked on the bottom with the words Little Homemaker and MADE IN JAPAN. Each of the Little Homemakers had a different task: one of them was holding a piece of cake out toward an imaginary guest; another was wiping dishes: a third held a broom; one was stirring something in a mixing bowl, and another was sewing. They were all doing something useful: my little homemaker was talking on the phone and gazing into the distance. And that is where I got the idea that Grandma thought I talked too much.

She was a rather stern woman, disinclined to tolerate nonsense and sassiness, and I was a lively, imaginative, sometimes willful child with plenty of both sass and nonsense in me, nonsense and sass that frequently spilled out. So the girl on the telephone was only the final bit of evidence I needed to confirm a suspicion I’d harbored for years.

My cousins and I are in Grandma’s kitchen, preparing a play that I’ve written and conscripted them into. We’re having a great time and I am kind of dancing around the room when Grandma appears in the doorway, looking displeased. We’re supposed to be cleaning the kitchen (or something), not dancing around the room and preparing a play. She shakes her head, the joy goes out of the room, and we return to the task at hand, chastened. It’s all my fault, but I don’t feel one bit guilty. I feel annoyed. Isn’t life meant for something better than cleaning the kitchen with your cousins? Is the kitchen really so dirty? Isn’t theater more important?

The knowledge that my own grandmother didn’t like me was a heavy burden, but not nearly as heavy as the burden of knowing I didn’t like her. When she died at the age of ninety-two, I was the only one of her sixteen grandchildren not present at her funeral. I didn’t have to explain my absence: I was the only one who lived far away, 1200 miles away, in New York City. But since I had traveled the same distance without a moment’s hesitation to attend my other grandmother’s funeral several years earlier, I knew that when I chose to stay away this time, my mother must have been unable to avoid seeing any longer, by my words and acts of omission if nothing else, that there was something missing in our relationship. That must have been painful for her; she loved her mother very much, and she also loved me. However, she never said a word about it to me.

It wasn’t until years later that I began to reassess my relationship with my grandmother. It started shortly after my mom died, as I began to go through her personal papers. One of the first things I found, in a drawer she had dedicated to storing special things, was a file folder in which she had saved cards she’d gotten from us on Mother’s Days. In the same folder were a few tiny notebook pages, carefully stored in a plastic sleeve, written in my grandmother’s hand. The pages held entries from a journal she had written in 1931, when my mother and her brothers were young children. I opened the pages carefully, heart racing for some reason I didn’t understand. Then I read:

My babies are growing up. I must write down some of their sayings and doings to help me remember on a lonesome day…We got 100 marbles for 5 cents tonight, and had lots of fun playing marbles after we got home from town. A new phonograph record for Elmer, The Little Things of Life, and a big bag of overripe bananas to fill up on.

As I read these words I was transported, with a strong, sympathetic pang I felt as a physical ache, to those days during the Depression when my mother was a little girl in a poor, but happy, family. My grandmother was then a young mother in love with her children, wise enough to know that a lonesome day would come, hopeful that capturing the memory of happier times might help her when it did. For the first time I felt the hardness in my heart where she was concerned begin to melt. And I wanted to read more.

I knew there was more, much more. My parents’ house was full of boxes of old letters, journals, and other assorted mementos that my mother had saved, both her own and her mother’s.

I remembered that my grandmother had always kept a tiny notebook about her, tucked into her apron pocket, and that she would jot things in it in spare moments between doing her household tasks. I knew that if any of those little notebooks had survived, the most likely place they would be stored was in my parents’ home, somewhere in the overwhelming piles of stuff.

I set out immediately on a passionate quest to find my grandmother’s journals, a quest that lasted several years and involved many hours of discouraging and tedious work, sifting through piles of old papers. I hoped to find many years’ worth of diaries; in the end, all I found was a few composition books she had written in as a schoolgirl, a few journals from her later years, and quite a few letters between her and my mother. But that was enough to fuel and guide me in my search for the grandmother I had never really known.

Back to Iowa.

The Journey Begins: Back to Bonair

If we were approaching Bonair from the east and we were about a mile away the first thing we should see would be the top of the elevator and the church steeple. As we come nearer we should see the houses and the white schoolhouse standing apart from the rest of the town...

So began the description my grandmother had written about her hometown in 1907. Fifteen years old at the time, she had gone on to describe the main street of her little town in careful and loving detail, building by building, ending her first entry with a description of the depot of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway.

A low and rather small building…painted yellow, with brown trimmings…in one corner of the room there is usually a bright fire...Four maps are on the walls and a candy and gum slot machine is in one corner…Throughout the whole building everything will be found neat and in order.

I first read these words—in old-fashioned handwriting, in fading ink—eighty-five years after they were written, sitting in the unfinished attic of the brownstone in Brooklyn where I lived: a long way from small-town Iowa. As I read I felt a sudden rush of connection across the miles and the years—and a growing, and painful, sense of closeness I had never before felt with my grandmother.

As I turned the fragile pages slowly and carefully, I discovered a side of her I had never known. To my surprise, I also found evidence that the mischievous streak I had always felt she had disapproved of in me was not entirely foreign to her own character, as revealed in one of the letters she had written, apparently as an assigned exercise for school:

Dear papa,

Now you know very well, my dear, that I am a very economical girl, but it would certainly cost at the very least one dollar (small sum, indeed) to attend a county fair, and I beg of you to allow me to call your attention to the fact that it would injure my health to remain at home on that notable day when the fair is to be held, so you may observe what an economical turn of mind I have, for doctor bills would certainly amount to more than the named sum. Please forward the required amount at once.

From your dutiful daughter, Effie

As I read on, I began to develop a desire—amorphous, inchoate, but also very strong—to follow the backward trail of my grandmother’s life. It was clear from the descriptions in her notebook that Bonair had been a very small town. I didn’t know if it even existed anymore, but if it did I wanted to find it, and see what it was like now. Most of all I wanted to learn more about the girl who had become my grandmother.

That summer I had the opportunity to visit Bonair. At first it had seemed that it probably did not even exist any longer: this was pre-Google, and Bonair was not on most maps. But I went to the library, I kept looking, and finally I found it: it was near Cresco, in the northeastern corner of the state. Not too great a detour on the road from Minneapolis, where we would be visiting my dad, to Chicago, where we would be going to see my husband’s parents on our way back east. So when we left my dad’s house in early August that year, instead of heading southeast from Minneapolis and driving across Wisconsin on the interstate, we dropped straight south and drove on smaller highways, into Iowa.

The Mississippi River valley in northeastern Iowa is hilly, with forested riverbanks and high bluffs. The highway, US 52, curves and dips along through these hills, and it is quiet, peaceful, and beautiful. As we neared Decorah and began to move in a more westerly direction, the land flattened out and we were driving past fields of corn and soybeans. We found our way to Cresco, and from there got directions to Bonair.

Finally the magic moment arrived, when we were able to slowly drive down the main street of what was left of Bonair in 1992, a hundred years after my grandmother was born there.

That evening we approached Bonair from the west, the opposite direction from the one my grandmother had described in her notebook. But no matter which way you came from, there was no church steeple, and no grain elevator. There was no train depot. There was a building on the north side of the street that looked as if it might have been a general store at one time. There were a few houses, some old, some new, and a couple of mobile homes. At the east end of town, where the Methodist church had once stood, in a vacant lot overgrown with weeds there was a church bell mounted on a brick foundation, and a brass plaque that read: On this site stood the Bonair United Methodist Church. After fulfilling its purpose since 1890, closed with a farewell sermon, June 14, 1987.

The church, too, had been lovingly and painstakingly described in detail by my grandmother in her composition book. Now it was gone, and there was nothing to see there but an empty churchyard returned to prairie, a weathered outhouse, the brick front steps of the church, a silent bell mounted on them, and the brass plaque. Not far from the site where the church had been was a boarded-up, square wooden building that looked like it might have been a one-room schoolhouse. We looked around, then we turned back toward the center of town.

If I had been alone, that probably would have been the end of the day’s exploration: I would have been inclined to savor the experience privately, to mull and read, and think and wonder, before returning to Bonair. But my husband is a more outgoing person than I am, and also had the good sense to see that it was silly to have come this far and not take it one step farther. So he knocked on the door of the house that looked like it might have been a general store at one time, and we introduced ourselves to the woman who answered. What felt like a close and personal secret to me at the time, something I felt irrationally should not be spoken of in anything louder than a whisper was, to my husband, exciting news to share: I was in possession of my grandmother’s journals! She had written all about this town! She may have lived in this very building!

His enthusiasm was irresistible: the woman invited us inside, and took us into the part of her home that had indeed once been a general store. She showed us the wooden sign she had saved from the train station when the depot was taken down, and my husband took a picture of me holding it.

I told her I was interested in finding out more about the history of the town, and wondered if she knew anything about what Bonair was like long ago. Oh, she said with a sigh, No, I don’t know much. I come here when everything was gone. She directed us to a neighbor’s house, and told us that the man who lived there had been here all his life. Perhaps he could tell us something more about the town.

We followed her directions, and a few minutes later were met at the door by the man’s wife, who looked at us warily. She warmed up a little when I explained my mission, but told me that her husband was very sick and couldn’t see anyone. I apologized for disturbing them, thanked her, and was turning to leave when she said, You know, if you want to know about the history of this area, you really ought to go on over to Lime Springs, and talk to Anna May Davis. She’s in her eighties, but she’s as peppy as anything, and she knows absolutely everything. The woman added that she herself had grown up in Lime Springs, where her father owned a mill, and had moved to Bonair in the 1930s when she married. I can remember driving through Bonair when I was a girl, and getting quite a thrill, she said. But by the time I got here most everything was gone.

That was the second time in less than an hour that I had heard almost the exact same words: a refrain of loss.

We drove the seven miles to Lime Springs and found Ms. Davis listed in the local telephone directory. I called her and explained my interest: she invited us to come to her house immediately. As we sat in her living room and I explained what I was interested in learning about, I mentioned that my cousins were all busy creating and raising the next generation of our family, and that it seemed to have fallen to me to research the past. A vibrant woman, indeed peppy as anything, she went straight to the point. You have a lot of work to do, she told me, And there’s no time to waste. There are people here you should talk to, but they’ll soon be dying!

A few months later, a major event occurred in our lives: the baby we had been wanting for some years was conceived. I continued to work on uncovering the story of my grandmother and her early life for as long as I could, at long distance, until shortly before his birth: I wrote letters to my mother’s cousins, telling them what I was trying to do. I received pictures and letters from them, and from Anna May Davis, pictures that would help me in my search. I carefully filed it all, I kept notes, and I began to write.

Then for a long time, other things took precedence. The first baby was followed by a second. Caring for them filled my days and much of the nights too, and when I wasn’t caring for them, I was struggling to contribute to our household income with freelance editorial assignments—or I was asleep, exhausted.

But finally, fourteen years after my first visit there, and with the blessing of my husband and our two boys, now thirteen and ten, I returned to Bonair.

***

I arrived there in 2006 without a fixed plan. In fact my going there at all had far more to do with the need for my husband and me to spend some time apart, than my having a clear sense of purpose about my writing. I had been invited to stay in the home of a friend who lived in a lovely river valley in southeastern Minnesota as a place of retreat anytime I wanted to. It seemed like a good time to retreat, so I made a plan to be away for ten days, and bought my plane ticket.

My original thought had been to spend the time I was there reading the old letters I had found stored away in my parents’ home when I was hunting for my grandmother’s journals, and writing. But I was going to be so close to Bonair, just a couple of hours away. So I decided I would go there with a couple of questions to research, and see where that might lead. I knew, for example, how my grandparents had met (at a box-lunch social), but where was the social held, and when? I knew that my grandmother had grown up in Bonair, and my grandfather somewhere in Iowa, but I had no idea where. I felt sure that by asking a few questions of this nature, and either finding or not finding the answers, a path of further inquiry would open up before me, and I would follow it.

It was a method that worked very well.

***

Cresco, Iowa is not far from Mason City, the hometown of Meredith Willson and the prototype for River City, the fictional town made famous by The Music Man. Cresco is the county seat of Howard County, and when I arrived there in the fall of 2006, it struck me as being a model small town. Everything a person could need was there: a clothing store, a grocery store, a gift shop, a Radio Shack, a hardware store, a furniture store. An Italian restaurant, a bakery, a