Dette er det verste jeg har sett! (This is the Worst I have Seen!)

MeEt tHe EditorS

Maya Geving

I am five years old. It’s fall but it feels like summer, September but still T-shirt weather. I love Disney princesses, goldfish crackers, and playgrounds. I hate getting dressed in the morning, finishing my plate, and my grandmother’s knitted wool socks. The mornings all start the same. They aren’t early, my mom put me in the afternoon kindergarten class instead of the morning one so we always have lots of time for breakfast and maybe a trip to the playground. Then, I get dressed in my school clothes, usually capri pants and a t-shirt with a butterfly or heart print on it. This morning is no different. I’m eating my usual breakfast of Froot Loops and milk at the kid’s table in our dining room. The room is big, encompassing the whole first story. The kitchen is to the left of the entryway with a large dining table in front of it. My father built it himself. In front of it is a small kids table, and to the right is our large chimney, with a living room with couches and TV behind it.

My mom is annoyed. My sister is two, and she won’t stop screaming. She doesn’t want to get dressed and my mom is losing her temper as she normally does. This was around the same time my sister dumped a whole box of Cheerios onto her head and all over the floor, so my mom is losing her patience from having to deal with the shenanigans of two young children. After breakfast, we stomp outside so that I can catch the school bus. Although my mom has a car, we always walk fifteen minutes to the bus stop. It’s a winding narrow country road in the outskirts of Cloquet, Minnesota. Our house is deep in the native American Fond Du Lac reservation, or “the rez” as my dad calls it. On the way we pass our nearest and only neighbor. My dad says they are two native American brothers. Their house is small and white but has at least fifteen cars in the driveway at all times. I always ask my parents why they have so many cars, but they never give me an answer that makes sense. We also pass many thick oak trees, some have fallen over. If we have extra time, my mom lets me and my sister play on the trees for a while before we continue our trek to the bus stop. It’s windy, and the trees are still green but with specks of orange in them, waiting for just the right time to fall. My wispy hair blows in my face as I scurry to catch up with the others.

My mom says she can’t wait for autumn to start for real. She isn’t from here. She is a Norwegian woman whose semester abroad in the States turned into marriage with an American man, a green card, and raising two kids in a small town close to Duluth. In Norway the autumns are dull and cold, so she loves how the heat stays until October and how the leaves light up in bright shades of red, orange, and yellow. Finally, we reach the end of the driveway where the bus usually picks me up. I gasp in surprise as I realize that our mailbox is barely standing and that our neighbor’s mailbox has been completely destroyed. The pole is laying flat on the ground with the box crushed underneath.

My mother sighs, “Must have been a drunk driver or something.”

I have no idea what that means but it sounds bad.

“Is that the same thing that happened to our trash cans the other day?” I ask.

We had woken up one morning to a large crash and found both our trash cans tipped over, with scraps of food all over the place. “No, that was a black bear,” she says before reminding us to never go outside alone or the bears would eat us, too.

I’m scared of the bears. A few months earlier my dad and I had been sitting on the porch when a bear stumbled into the vegetable garden in front of us. It was pretty far away so we weren’t in any danger, but I was still terrified. My dad looked at it in awe, trying to get me to watch as well but I was too scared to even turn my head around. Another time, my mom, my sister, and I were walking on a trail in Jay Cooke State Park when a bear emerged on the trail a distance in front of us. My sister started screaming and my mom joked that we never had to be afraid of bears when she was there because she was so loud that she’d scare them all away.

The bus winds around the corner and stops right beside us, right in front of the street sign that reads, Twin Lakes Drive. My mom holds my sister in her arms as I climb the steps of the bright yellow school bus. I sit down on one of the green leather seats, rolling my fingers over the rips and scratches in them. I look out the window and see my mom waving goodbye, then lifting my sister’s hand to teach her how to wave too. I wave back before focusing my attention on the yells and laughter of the other kids behind me, the bumpiness of the road, and the way the trees and light poles rushed past me as the bus carried on its way to Washington Elementary School. * * *

Autumn turns into winter. The heat of the fireplace warms up my face as I gaze outwards into our backyard. Large piles of snow fill the surrounding area. My sister and I begged our dad to make them into hills so we could slide down on our tiny sleds. Soon it will be Christmas and today we are going to do one of my favorite Christmas activities. We’re going to eat rice porridge, a traditional Norwegian dessert at my mom’s friend’s house. One of the most popular Norwegian Christmas traditions is to make a large pot of rice porridge and stir one almond into it. When eating, the lucky receiver of the almond must keep it a secret until after the meal is over. It’s common to sneakily slide your almond under your napkin or behind your bowl and keep eating until everyone is finished. After the proud winner announces their victory, they are rewarded with a marzipan pig.

After our dinner, I am booming with excitement as a bowl of rice porridge is placed in front of me. I have never gotten the almond, except for last year when both my sister and I suspiciously found almonds in our porridge.

“They must have magically appeared,” my mom said. I believed her, but there was an inkling of doubt in my mind. I stir my wooden spoon around in the milky white porridge, mixing the cinnamon and sugar that was on top into the rest of the porridge. I can’t feel anything with my spoon apart from mush. I start eating, taking huge gulps of the porridge that leave a mustache above my lip. I can feel the disappointment creeping in on me. It’s becoming more and more obvious that I didn’t get the almond. I turn around to look at my sister, staring her down in disdain. I think my mom must have put it in her bowl since she’s the youngest. I stare at her round face and chunky blonde bangs, knowing I’d throw a huge tantrum if she got the almond. But she is starting to look disappointed too.

All hope of getting the almond is gone as I devour my last few bites of porridge. My family and my mom’s friend’s family finished their porridge too. I look around in anticipation. My parents are sitting in front of me, wearing their traditional Norwegian knitted sweaters with blue and white yarn forming intricate patterns across the chest area, complete with a red patterned neckline. I’m so happy that they didn’t make me wear mine because I absolutely hate the feeling of rough yarn against my skin. I can’t tell if any of them got the almond until my dad mischievously pulls it out from his napkin. I sigh as he is gifted the yellow marzipan pig that I wanted so badly. To my surprise, he doesn’t seem very happy about it.

“I hate marzipan,” he says before breaking it in two and giving my sister and me a half each.

Winter turns into spring . . . finally. Spring is my birthday month, and I can’t wait to turn six. But that’s in May, and I must survive the dreariness and cold of March and April first. The maple syrup hunts help though. My dad is a man of many hobbies. In March, making maple syrup from scratch is his most important one. I usually sit in the back of his large green sled all huddled up while we scavenge the forest for maple trees. Once we find one, he takes out a metal cylinder tap and hammers it into the tree. Then he takes out a leftover milk jug and fastens it to the tap, so the maple sap has something to flow into. A few weeks later, when the sun has warmed up the trees enough, we walk through the patches of grass and snow to see how much sap has been collected in the buckets. Sometimes we’re lucky and the jug is almost completely full of sap. Other times only the bottom of the jug contains a tiny bit of sap. Once we collect all the sap, my dad brings it to the large pot we have hoisted on top of our outside fireplace. There, it boils for hours and hours, until the watery sap turns into a golden sugary syrup. My dad usually lets me taste a spoonful of the sugary goodness before pouring it into washed beer bottles to give away as presents or keep at home.

I try to enjoy the spring. I don’t fully grasp that this will be my last spring in Minnesota for a long time. “We’re moving to Norway” is a sentence I’ve heard a lot over the past few months. I like Norway and I miss my grandma and my cousins. But I don’t want to move. I like my elementary school and my friends, our log house in the woods, and our cat which we apparently aren’t bringing. Unfortunately, my parents seem determined to move. It’s April and they have decided we will go on a short trip to Norway to move some of our stuff, then make the big move during the summer. My mom also says that my grandma is sick and that we need to see her.

“Sick like she has a cold?” I ask.

“No, she’s sicker than that,” my mom replies.

I don’t understand what she means until we arrived in Norway a few weeks later. My cousin picks us up at the Bergen airport. She’s in her twenties, and I want to be just like her.

“We’re going to see grandma,” she says to me and my sister.

But she doesn’t take us to the countryside and the small white house with red-rimmed windows that I remember my grandma living in. Instead, we arrive at a large hospital with many floors and a weird sterile smell. My cousin leads us through the maze of doors and staircases in the hospital. My mom is holding a blue sweater that she plans to give my grandmother. As we enter the quaint hospital room, I am taken aback by surprise. I barely recognize my grandmother. The person in the hospital bed looks like a ghost of the grandmother that taught me how to bake raisin buns and plant strawberry bushes.

“You’ve gotten so skinny; I got you this sweater but it’s way too big,” my mom exclaims.

My grandma looks tired but happy to see us. I hold her hand while lightly touching the white hospital bracelet.

My grandma has something called cancer. My mom says it spreads throughout your whole body and makes you very sick. This doesn’t make sense to me. When people get sick, they get better eventually. I thought that was how it worked. But with grandma, it doesn’t seem like she is on the path of recovery. She is still able to come home after a few days, but she only stays in a hospital bed in the living room. We stay in her house, my sister and I sharing the upstairs bedroom that had been my mom’s as a child and my parents taking grandma’s bedroom. My sister and I spend lots of time in the living room playing with the few toys grandma has, while she sleeps or silently watches. I know I can say whatever I want when my parents aren’t around because grandma doesn’t understand English.

Grandma is a woman of her generation. She was born towards the end of World War II when food and money were scarce. She believes potatoes are the healthiest food on the planet and would make her children eat them for every meal. Instead of attending high school or college, she earned her education from a traditional “housewife school” and was very proud of it. These establishments were known for teaching Norwegian women how to properly cook and clean for their husbands in the fifties and sixties. She is a homebody, and never visits the United States. Instead, she sends letters and packages with knitted socks and sweaters for my sister and me. When she was healthier, she would spend her time planting flowers in her garden, baking cinnamon and raisin buns, and tanning on her balcony overlooking the forest. She hates messes and likes everything to be neat and orderly. Although she’s only in her sixties, she doesn’t know any English because she went to school before it was taught as a second language in Norway. Due to this, my mom describes her encounters with my dad as limited but still comical. She tells me about one of the first times she brought dad to Norway. Dad decided to make homemade pizza (another one of his hobbies) in her small wooden kitchen. Due to the small proximity of the kitchen, my dad managed to get flour all over the counters and floor as he twisted and kneaded the dough.

My poor neat-freak grandma was horrified by the mess and exclaimed, “Dette er det verste jeg har sett!” one of her most used phrases. It means “this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen!”

My parents leave my sister and I at our aunt’s house for a couple days. They are taking my grandma's red Volvo on the seven-hour trip over the mountain from western Norway to eastern Norway. My dad has a job interview at an international school, and they are looking for a house for us as well. I stay with my aunt but visit grandma every day. My mom told me grandma is good at drawing, so I ask her to draw me a picture. She sits upright in her bed carefully sketching before turning to show me what she has drawn. It’s a tiny orange fox with green grass all around it. I wish I could draw that well.

When my parents come back, we are almost ready to travel back to Minnesota. Grandma tells my mom that she will try to make it until the summer. I don’t understand what she means. Of course, grandma will be here in the summer, how couldn’t she? We wake up early on our last morning and I walk over to my grandma’s bedside. I whisper “Ha det Mormor,” meaning “goodbye grandma” in Norwegian.

Eleven days later my mom gets the call. I walk into the bathroom with wooden closets and green tiles to find her sitting down on the edge of the bathtub, sobbing. I’ve never seen her this upset before. My mom isn’t religious, but she tells me grandma is in heaven now and that she won’t be waiting for us in Norway when we make the big move. I don’t fully understand what death is. It’s incomprehensible to me that someone can be there one day and be gone the next. All I know is that I miss grandma.

Spring is in full bloom. The patches of snow on our lawn finally melt by the time my birthday comes in mid-May. My mom throws me a big birthday party with the three-layered birthday cake from the grocery store that I really wanted. My kindergarten friends and I play pin-the-tail on the donkey and drink blue raspberry Kool-Aid in my backyard. Later in the month we haul almost all our belongings into the garage and place them on plastic tables. We’re having a garage sale to get rid of most of our stuff before we move.

The days go by quickly. On the last day of kindergarten my classmates write me little notes and drawings wishing me good luck in Norway. Our house starts to feel empty. Our last night in Minnesota is spent at the AmericInn hotel by the highway and we invite all our friends over for a final goodbye. We kids play in the pool while our parents sit at the surrounding tables talking. The goodbyes to my friends don’t seem very final because mom says everyone will visit us in Norway.

I get the window seat in the airplane. I love flying, and I’ve had a passport since I was only a few months old. I look out at the dark sky and white clouds. I don’t understand how the plane can just fly right through the clouds instead of crashing into them. Just like I don’t understand that my home isn’t a pine house in the woods anymore or that I’ll never see grandma again. I don’t understand why my parents chose to start a new life in a new country or why I have to leave all my friends. I am six years old and oblivious to many of the greater dynamics in my life. I look away from the window and down at the little table in front of me. The flight attendant gave me crayons and coloring paper. As I reach my hand out to grab a crayon so I can keep coloring, my hand slips and I end up knocking over a whole box of crayons onto the floor. Some of them roll over towards my mom’s seat. When she notices the mess I made, she exclaims, “Dette er det verste jeg har sett!” and laughs. I laugh too.