116 Cook Street

Welcome to 116 Cook Street. This small, yellow house on a tree-lined street in West Union, IA, has been important to me for a while now, significant to me far before I was even around. Cliff and Alma Saboe, my grandparents, called this home for well over fifty years. This is the place where my mother and uncle grew up and where my sisters and I visited and "camped out" for weeks at a time during the summers as children. It is a place of countless memories --- the smell of my grandmother's eggs on weekend mornings, playing endless games of rummy 500 and wind-up bowling games late in to the night, watching episodes of Dallas with Grandma at far too young an age, and listening to my grandpa recount my extensive Norwegian family genealogy. 116 Cook Street is a place of happy memories, of sad times, of teenage angst and misunderstanding, of frustration, anger, hard-kept secrets, respect, and love --- common to most families I know.

My grandma Alma died just over seven years ago last Sunday, on the very date that I found myself there with my parents cleaning out her kitchen cupboards and glassware that hadn't been used --- or washed --- in a very long time. My grandfather recently moved to a veterans' nursing home in Marshalltown, and we are preparing to turn over the keys to his home to the auction house in a couple of weeks. While my mother and I manned the kitchen and my grandfather's stamp collection, my dad was in the garage sorting through my grandmother's woodworking and fishing equipment. One wouldn't think that two people could accumulate so much in a home smaller by over 100 square feet than my own condo, but it's possible. And one also would think that perhaps one knows his/her parents or grandparents well, but I was reminded yet again last Sunday that we each are too complex to possibly ever be fully understood by another. Either that, or we are too amusing or surprising for our own good --- especially true of my grandparents after finding several issues of "Forum: the International Journal of Human Relations" from 1980 and 1981 buried under a church hymnal in the garage. (I'll let you google that on your own ... !) Transitions in life are never easy, and goodbyes and change are particularly difficult for me. But even though we are witnessing fifty-plus years of the life of one family being boxed, tossed, and labeled, it never changes what DID happen here --- the joyful, the painful, and everything in between.