Relics

Alyce came home to Lake of the Woods the summer of 1933. She needed to rest. George was waiting. He and his sister, Edith, both worked at Klimek's Lodge, and in later years Edith talked about her role back then of making sure Alyce actually did rest. My mother didn't tell stories of rest. She told stories of the gaggle of young adults who worked for her mother, "Ma Klimek." Mary Jane's uncles, aunts and cousins -- Lores, Klimeks, Delaneys, Youngs, Highs, Russ's, all at one time or another came under the iron hand of Elizabeth Friesinger Klimek.

All of it happened before Mary Jane came to be, and she would remember it in much the same was that she remembered the tales of Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. Her mother's romantic streak gave glitter to even the suffering times. It was the Great Depression. You'd never have known it from the description of life on the Lake. Prohibition would end that summer, but the stories predated that time while also merging with it. In the child's mind her mother had, once upon a time,  occupied parallel worlds. There was a world of illness and the sanatorium, and a world of parties, bootlegged whiskey and beer, dances at the old Wigwam Hall just walking distance from the Lodge where big bands came up from Fargo and Grand Forks on tour. She and George waltzed. Her Charleston wowed the fellows. She laughed to the Foxtrot. She wrote, "It was swell!"

"Their" songs were "The Waltz You Saved for Me," and "Goodnight Sweetheart." Of course they were! For most of the time those songs were popular the young lovers were separated. Ever in dreams, while I'm away, dear, I'll hear that melody. Of course. Goodnight Sweetheart...though I'm not beside you...sleep will banish sorrow. Mary Jane as a child thought these songs were lullabies. She fell asleep each night to strains of loss. Whisper goodbye...whisper goodbye...whisper, Goodbye.

Alyce and George.
Honeymoon Cabin at the Northwest Angle

Alyce returned, maybe she rested--maybe she didn't, and they married on September 3, 1934.

Mary Jane found her mother's brown wedding dress in the attic. She must have been about eight. Brown? Yes, brown. And the story of the wedding in the priest's rectory came out. "I could smell the potatoes burning in the kitchen," she laughed. The priest was poor and liked his solitude. A bit of a hermit, maybe. He wouldn't have a housekeeper. His name was Worm. George, never baptized but raised Lutheran by his pious mother, Annie, could not be married in the Catholic Church, and Father Worm took that law literally. "I didn't care about the brown dress. I didn't care about the dingy rectory. I had your father, Mary Jane, and that was all I cared about that day and ever afterwards."

The girl created a fairy tale of them and their honeymoon cabin on Lake of the Woods, their canoe trips to the islands, the granite rock they carried back with them. It was built into the great stone fireplace in the historical center in Bemidji. She touched it once, as one would touch a relic--the stones in Jerusalem where Jesus walked, or one of the bluestones that form and ancient holy place of Stonehenge.

It's the black granite in the center