We Walked When the Moon was Out

 

One of my first watercolours, painted on New Year's Day, 2021

In the mid-eighties, I recorded a conversation with my Aunt Edna, also known as “Sissy,” who had recently moved to Canada from Church Creek, Maryland. Though Sissy grew up in the US and lived most of her life there, she resided in Denmark with her parents and siblings for two periods in her life. The first time was in 1921. The family only stayed a few months before coming back. Then, after WWII, the family once again left the US for Farstrup Sogn in North Jylland where Sissy’s mother and father would live out their lives. Sissy and her sister, Hilda, who was my mother, returned to the US in 1951. My mom left for Canada to marry my father shortly after. Edna was 72 years old at the time of my interview and her memory seems to have merged the two stays in Denmark together here and there. The reference to her brother Ivan Simonsen coming along to put boughs on her grandmother’s grave could not have happened as told, since Ivan died at age 15 in 1928, after a hunting accident in Ohio. I’ve tried to identify these types of anomalies in the transcript.

Excerpts from a Conversation with Sissy
(Edna Simonsen Smith Phillips b. 1912 d. 1996)
May 16, 1984
Ryley, Alberta, Canada

Me:  Do you know when Hulda Simonsen, your grandmother, died?

Sissy:  She died before we came over [to Denmark] the last time. I was thirty [32] years old. I was thirty years old when she died.

Me: And you were born in 1912, so it would have been 1942?

Sissy: Yes. My grandfather, Martinus, was living when we went over there. So my grandmother had just died. We went over there in 1945, right after the war.

Me: Do you know where she died?

Sissy:  In Staun. Christmas come and they were all supposed to go to Ivan’s [Martinus & Hulda’s son] to dance around the tree…and she [Hulda] said it wasn’t Christmas anymore because the old man and her live right across the road from Ivan [Edna’s uncle, Ivan Simonsen] and they had celebrated Christmas three days before that, dancing around the tree and thought it was funny Ivan didn’t come over. Her and Martinus danced around the tree together –wasn’t that cute?—I can just about see them now…hand in hand going around by themselves. They lived right across the road. Have you seen the house they lived in?

Me. No.

Sissy:  I bet that house is still there. I was nine years old the other time [1921]. I was there, so it was quite a few years.

Me:  Who lives there now, do you know?

Sissy:  No. I did know once. I can see her now [Hulda]. Oh, Land! She could walk long miles. She’d walk clear to….where Wilda [her aunt Avilda Simonsen] lived….near about thirty miles! They had no cars, no buses. My grandmother walked. Walked through the woods and everything. I can see the woods now…oaks, walked when the moon was out. I walked behind my grandmother. She could keep up with the best of them. Ain’t that something! I can see her walking. Them days they didn’t have a motorcar. They walked…and me trotting behind. And Brother [Ivan Simonsen], poor brother. Me and my brother…he was a year younger than me.

And Peter Skriver, he was a friend of my father, and he was a sheriff. His daughter lived right there in Staun and we’d play. They had a fine home. We put flowers on my grandmother’s grave. We went into the woods and collected little bags of ferns at Christmas time…and all that holly. We dragged it up there and I nearly fainted ‘cause I dragged so many up there and put it on top of the grave…decorated the whole grave at Staun. [Farstrup]

And I remember the day we left [in 1921]. Funny. And Peter Skriver drove us when my grandmother came out to say good-bye, she cried. You know, she knew she'd never see me no more or my father again.