My great-grandfather Jens Naeseth, Anglicized to Nesset, was a contentious fellow, a landowner in Norway who for reasons unknown (but not beyond surmise) sold out and moved to the new world of Minnesota. Here, he and his sons homesteaded a good farm near Delavan, in the south central part of the state just south of Lura Lake.
At some point, Jens had a falling-out with his sons Young Jens and Ole. John, Jens' youngest son and my grandfather-to-be, had already left home for more peaceful pastures. For spite, Jens went a half-mile down the one-lane gravel road and homesteaded a much poorer farm, two tillable fields and an unfarmable slough.
Jens died in the 1920s. When the agricultural depression of the later '20s swept away the good farm, Young Jens and Ole moved down the road to work their late father's not-so-good spite farm. During the Great Depression, this farm fed a number of people, including my grandmother's brother Tom and my grandfather's three sisters, Anna, Hannah and Rhoda, who lived in Hannah's house in Delavan. (When I was five I saw my centenarian Great-Aunt Rhoda, witless and toothless, gumming pancakes in Hannah's kitchen — she who as a teenager had witnessed the Great Northfield Raid of 1876, my living link to the James-Younger gang).
In the mid-1930s, future grandfather John returned from ventures in western Minnesota to take over the farm, his brothers being in their mid-80s by then and he in only his mid-70s. In 1940, my future grandmother returned to the farm from Decorah, Iowa, where she had been running a boardinghouse while their sons attended college. She would cook and clean and sew and garden and put up preserves, manage house and home while my grandfather worked in the fields.
The stage was set. In 1945, my father, newly home from World War II service and with a teaching job in Mankato, brought my mother and me to the farm, where we lived for several months until he could find us a place to live in crowded, postwar Mankato. I was 2½, and this farm, without electricity or running water, with its corncob-burning potbelly stove and kerosene lamps and board sidewalk to the outhouse, was the setting of my first memories and of many more memories in the course of the eight summers that followed.
And what amazing memories they were. My grandfather farmed with two immense Belgian workhorses, Queenie and Dickaboy. I remember being placed on Queenie's back, like a wide white floor, and other times riding beside my grandfather to the upper field behind those two massive rumps. There were dangers on the farm, menacing hogs I was warned to stay away from, and a rooster who flew into the faces of children, pecking at their teeth (the rascal was dispatched by my uncle with a 12-gauge shotgun when it pecked one of his children).
Yet the darkness on the farm was not fearful, but magical: deep and everywhere at night, with a sky full of more stars than I had ever seen, even in the small Iowa town where I lived with my parents. The sun rose over an eastern field with a white church in the distance, the West Church, where Jens and Brita, my great-grandmother, and Anna, Hannah and Rhoda lay buried beside Young Jens and Ole. I played with my cousins in the front yard of the farmhouse, across the gravel lane from that green field, that white church, enfolded by that eastern light. I still dream about it.
Even this primitive place had its labor-saving devices. My grandfather pumped well water with the help of a one-cylinder, gasoline-powered motor whose bright red flywheel was the most mysterious and wonderful object I had ever seen. This engine was Grandpa's "mota."