Carousels

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The recent news stories about the Minnesota State Fair reminded me that my father took my older brother Kit and me to the state fair one summer. I must have been six or seven. We were living in Minneapolis at the time. 

I remember that it was warm and crowded and that we walked and walked. At one point we walked through the Midway, with tall painted panels advertising strange beings, like the Bearded Lady and the Tattooed Man. My father hustled us past those. Our destination was the carousel. 

I was entranced—-the music, the motion, the painted images at the top, the lights, the horses with their wooden manes, forever gliding up and down on their metal poles. That was my first carousel ride, with my father watching me. 

I have ridden many carousels since that day, long after I had given up more exciting amusement park rides. When my son and daughter were growing up, they rode the carousel on the Washington Mall, on our summer visits to the Smithsonian museums. Years later, my granddaughter Emma rode that same carousel in its new home in Glen Echo Park in Maryland. On my refrigerator door I have a photo of Emma age three on a prancing carousel horse, with Bill standing beside her, smiling and holding her securely. Forever going around to the music, while the painted pony goes up and down.

Usually the carousel figures are horses of different colors, but sometimes there are zebras or other animals. The last carousel that I saw—-but did not ride, because it wasn’t operating that October day in 2018—was in the seaside village of Cascais near Lisbon in Portugal. It was a beautiful small carousel, with horses, but also a bull, a giraffe, a pig, a donkey, and for little children, a swan and a rooster, all carefully carved and painted. 

I guess it is fitting for my love of carousels that I played the part of the carousel owner Mrs. Mullin in a community theatre production of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel. My daughter Melinda was in the production, too, as one of the children, and we had fun going to rehearsals together and to the cast parties after the end of the run.

A wish: that I may ride a carousel one more time, before the music ends.

“…And the seasons they go round and round

And the painted ponies go up and down

We’re captive on the carousel of time

We can’t return we can only look behind

From where we came

And go round and round and round

In the circle game…”

The Circle Game, by Joni Mitchell

Clearing Out Clutter

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July 17, 2024

I have been busy looking in corners and clearing out items I no longer am using or no longer need or wish to keep—-a child’s guitar, a computer keyboard, canning jars—-and today I opened a cardboard box of sewing notions and fabric pieces of various sizes. In the box were the last two pages of a letter from my mother—inside this particular box because on the back side of the last page of her letter she had typed instructions on how to replace zippers.

Reading the letter, I can hear my mother’s voice again, chatting about the work she was doing in their garden in Oregon, the photo I had sent of my little son David, soon to be one year old, and the problems facing her mother-in-law (my grandmother) because my grandfather was developing dementia and needing more care. My grandparents lived faraway in Arkansas. 

My mother wrote “I just hope that I die in a hurry while I still find the daily routine a challenge and a pleasure.” 

I cannot stop the tears. She was sixty-one when she wrote those words. Twenty-two years later she would decline relatively quickly and die of congestive heart failure, surrounded by family who loved her. I held her hand. I closed her eyes.

I fold the letter carefully. I will put this scrap of letter into the blue box that holds the last of my mother’s papers. 

Not everything is clutter. 

Kristin Moyer

To the New World….

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Late in the fall of 1886, Carolina Margareta Brandt, my great-grandaunt, left Sweden on the long journey to America. With Carolina age 39 traveled her niece, Milda Kristina age 14, and her nephew Carl Henning age 12. These two also were Carolina’s step-children, because Carolina had married August Johnson the widower of her sister Cristina Carlotta who had died 6 days after Carl’s birth. The youngest in the group was Carolina’s and August’s son Gustaf Albert, age 9. Another woman and her children from the village went with them. 

The group traveled from their village near Lake Vanern in central Sweden to Gothenburg’s harbor. They sailed on the Diana from Gothenburg to Frederickshavn in Denmark, then took another ship to Bremen, Germany where they boarded a German steam/clipper ship the SS Hermann built 1865. 

They landed in Baltimore on November 11, 1886 and traveled by train to Minneapolis where my great-grandfather August Johnson was waiting for them. He was sitting on the porch of a boarding house, when his wife and his three children came trundling along the walk, looking, according to the family story, like gypsies. 

The iron-bound wooden trunk you see in the photographs also went to the New World, via Liverpool and then to Baltimore. I am sure the family traveled with smaller bags, too.

What do you think Carolina packed in that trunk? Was my grandmother Milda Kristina allowed to put something in it? What would you take from home across an ocean to a new land? The trunk, a cherished family heirloom, now sits in the home of one of Milda’s great-granddaughters. 

Last June, I stood on the bow of the canal boat M/S Juno built 1874 as it sailed out of Gothenburg harbor on its way to the Gota Canal system of rivers, canals, and lakes, and ultimately into the North Sea and the docks of Stockholm. I thought about those brave women in my family who sailed from that same harbor across the Atlantic Ocean, and that wooden trunk containing pieces of their lives. I felt a circle had been closed. And I was grateful for the traits of tenacity, resiliency, and courage I have inherited. 

Solar Eclipse, April 8, 2024

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And while the moon passes in front of the sun
And thousands tilt their heads 
And stare with their black opaque eyes

On my neighbor’s roof 
the men with hammers continue
tapping tapping

Across the pond
 a lawnmower growls into life
ruthless with the spring

And at my poolside 
the men with their long brushes
Sweep the walls slowly steadily

The light dims, the day cools
but the hammers tap tap tap

(with some apologies to William Carlos Williams)

Kristin Moyer
April 2024

Singer of Birches

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The tree crew is here today. They came with a big truck and a chipper and had a difficult time lining up the truck to pull through the pasture gate and then turn around so the truck is heading down the drive. I stopped watching and went into the house. For the past two hours the team of three has been up the big maple tree in my back yard—well, two are up the tree, I think, and one on the ground. That tree is a glorious color in the fall, and then drops a thick load of leaves over my shade garden. For the past few years it has taken to dropping branches unexpectedly. Last month after a wind storm I discovered a very large branch had fallen next to the glider I had bought and put together in 2015 to honor what would have been my 50th wedding anniversary—-we made it to our 45th anniversary before Bill’s death. That heavy branch smashed a plastic side table and would have squashed me, had I been under it.

But I love that maple tree nonetheless. Bill and I planted it in 1978, the year after we moved here. We also planted the two willow oaks and the pear tree….too close to the house…and then a long list of other trees, some we planted, others planted by landscapers. Not all the trees have survived, but I think we planted over thirty trees on this property, and the edges of the lot are ringed with wild native trees, including hickory, persimmon, wild cherry, eastern red cedar, and tulip poplar. 

I grew up loving trees. I have early memories of the birch trees with their shimmering branches at our cabin northern Minnesota. My mother hung a hammock for me between two birches to the west of the cabin. I was three when I first rocked in that hammock, toes reaching for the blue sky and singing to myself. My father would come along and say, “What are you thinking about, CheeChee?”—-the name I called myself before I could pronounce Kristin. But I was thinking about everything and nothing. 

There were tall straight Norway pines at the cabin, too, more stately than my sister birches. On the hill above the cabin there was a Norway that I climbed when I was nine or so, with the neighbor kids. A young sapling grew up next to it, and I could shinny up the sapling and then grasp the lowest branch of the Norway and swing up onto that first branch. And from there pull myself from one branch to the next until I was high enough to see over the other trees and across the lake. I remember hanging onto the branches high in the tree, feeling the wind on my face and hearing the cry of the loons, thinking myself invincible. 

During that same time period we were living in Fort Knox Kentucky, in military rowhouses encircled by red clay, and there were few if any trees to climb there until we moved into a rambling house next to an old fenced cemetery  and surrounded by military barracks. But there was a big sassafras tree in the backyard, perfect for me to climb, with a low enough branch to start me upward and a very comfortable branch for me to sit on and sulk when I was mad at my mother…which seemed to be often during that time. I was in seventh grade. I liked to chew the young sassafras leaves and small twigs and smell the bark…it smelled like the South and summer. 

By the time I was in high school I had stopped climbing trees but I never stopped loving them. Their dangerous beauty surrounds my house now, and in the late summers each year I return to the Minnesota cabin, and sitting in the hammock I sing to the birches my sweet songs. 

February 16, 2024

Wanderlust

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And so we dream of adventuring

And store the travel brochures in shoeboxes on our closet shelves

And fall asleep singing to ourselves “on the shores of Mandalay where the flying fishes play”

And then find a man who has a compass in his heart too

Who hears the seagulls flying over Illinois corn fields

And in time

We take flight

So many places with strange sounding names…


Now in this octogenarian decade
The names still call to us, like sirens on the rocks

All those points not yet seen or touched

But the bed also sets up a steady hum

Home, it hums, home, stay here, be warm
Snuggle down in the sleek sheets
Never move again

Outside in the winter moonlight, the Lorelei sing

Kristin Moyer
January 2024

January 8th, 2024

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I am taking down my Christmas tree, two days after 12th Night, on the 8th day of January, and I am thinking of my mother, who was the creator of Christmas celebrations in my family when I was growing up. 

She was the first generation American in her family, with both parents immigrating from Sweden, and she brought to her marriage all the Swedish traditions of Yuletide celebrations—- evergreens and a fir tree in the house, packages wrapped in white and tied with red ribbon, a Yulbord on Christmas Eve. 

When my mother was growing up, there were journeys by a horse-drawn sleigh across the snow-covered fields to midnight services on Christmas Eve at the little Lutheran church in central Minnesota. Santa arrived at their home to the tune of sleigh bells. Family gathered on Christmas Eve, and extended family gathered for Second Day of Christmas. 

My father came from an English/Scots-Irish family in Arkansas, and I don’t think his mother made much fuss over Christmas at all.  

But my mother did, and she inculcated her four children with the rituals of a Swedish Christmas, though we never celebrated St. Lucia’s Day. We carried my mother’s  traditions forward into our own families when we married. 

All the ornaments now are off my tree, including the very old glass ornaments stored in a box labeled in my mother’s hand-writing, For Bill and Kristin. Now I am struggling with untangling the six strands of white lights from the tree, which has dried out terribly. It stopped taking up water at some point. 

My lower back is hurting. I have to sit down for a bit. I am 81 years old, three years younger than my mother who died on this day, January 8th, 1992, thirty-two years ago. I was at the hospital when she died. My sister and my two children were were there, too. It was a bright sunny January day. 

The last strands of lights are off the tree, and I spread a sheet on the living room floor, press my foot on the lever of the German made tree stand, and gently lift and lower the dried out tree to the sheet.

I haul the awkward tree bundle out of the living room, squeezing past furniture, and out the kitchen door, thinking of my mother on this anniversary of her death.

 Not long ago, I read that a person’s life span is not measured by the actual number of years lived, but by the ripples they created during their lives. 

If I look at the ripples my mother created with her Christmas rituals alone, those ripples will go on for a very long time.

 My older brother had two children, and they have four children total. I have two children, and they have three children total. My sister has two children and one of those sons has four children. Even if only small pieces of my mother’s traditions are carried forward, there are eleven in the newest generation to be the bearers. 

I drop the tree bundle on the kitchen patio. It now is almost dark. Tomorrow I will put the tree up in a corner of the yard, to be a winter shelter for the little birds.

I look up at the dark sky, and turn back to the house. Lots of clean up still to do. 

January 8, 2024

Kristin Moyer

Winter Dreams

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For those of you who grew up with winter snows:
May your dreams be filled with the snows of childhood

 With snow angels and snow men

 With sledding on nearby hills and trying out new Christmas skis

With the taste of brittle snow candy made by pouring hot maple syrup on fresh snow

 With the smell of wet mittens drying out on radiators

And with the sound of snow falling softly all around you in the winter's night. 

Sleep well, sweet dreams.

January 2, 2024

Live Slowly, Move Simply, Look Softly

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My house sitter Marcie knows how to relish and savor my home on the hill, perhaps better than I do, because I always have a long list of jobs I must do. I look around the garden and see all the weeds I must pull. Marcie who also is a gardener looks and sees the flowers.

In the mornings when Marcie is at my house, she likes to take her mug of freshly brewed coffee outside to sit on the wooden bench under the maple tree. Kali my old dog is still inside, asleep and snoring. From the bench Marcie can see all the birds who flock to the feeders: the cardinals in the bright coats, the chickadees who bob through the air, and the tufted titmice who wait on the branches. Sometimes the bluebird darts inside its special feeder for its treat of dried mealworms, and the downy woodpecker taps at the suet feeder. On the rough bark of the maple the white breasted nuthatch hops headfirst down the trunk, seeking insects. 

The world is filled with jubilant birdsong. Under the feeders the gray squirrels and chipmunks compete for fallen seeds. One morning Marcie was sitting so silently that the red fox who has a den by the fence came to the feeder for fallen seeds. It sensed Marcie’s presence, raised its head, and looked directly into her eyes before it turned and ran.

I think I must take my own mug of coffee and sit on the bench under the maple tree and open myself to the quiet morning.

Kristin Moyer

Written September 2013–posting November 2023

Gratitude 2023

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November 8, 2023

she swabs my shoulder briskly
and I look away as the needle sinks in

recalling my gratitude for that first Covid shot 
and then the second one
that released me into daylight and hugs

today is my seventh Covid shot

pushing my shirtsleeve down
walking into the sunshine of my world
on this bright November day

now missing 1,136,920 of my people due to Covid-19 
less we forget

no taps will be played 
remember them

 Kristin Moyer