Sunday is Grandparents Day in the US.
This is my maternal great-grandmother, Emma.
Reimagined.
Emma was the youngest of six children and the first to immigrate to the United States from Sweden (Dalarna County.) She was a seamstress to titled ladies in Stockholm before her trans-Atlantic journey. When settled in Chicago, she met and married my great-grandfather, Peter, a widower. They had one child, my grandma Myrle. She had one child, my mother.
Emma was my discipline in the formative years, she was also unconditional love. She taught me to cook and bake and sew and made sure I always remembered I was a Swede.
Many years later, when she began showing signs of dementia, she never once raised her voice to me. And I was always remembered. She died when my son was three weeks old. Five generations for a very brief time.
The original photograph was taken in Sweden about 1900 and she was probably fifteen-ish.
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