Background

My great-grandmother, Anna Ellingsen, was born in Sortland, Lofoten in 1868. Unlike her descendants, for the most part tall and blond, she was a petite lady with flashing eyes and dark hair. She looked Italian, my mother used to say. Way up in Norway, above the Arctic circle, she must have cut an exotic figure and also been quite adventurous and spirited, since she traveled by herself to distant Bergen to find work in the telephone company. Her boss was Johan Wibye Meinich. They were the same age and it was probably love at first sight, because they married and had two children. My granduncle Birger, born in 1896 and my grandmother Ruth, born in 1898, were both very handsome people with the deep-set hooded eyes of their mother.

On my wall hangs the framed embroidery cloth that Anna made in Sortland in 1881, when she was only 13. The thoughts of someone sewing tend to wander, but she could certainly not have imagined that her little cloth would end up on her great-granddaughter's wall in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I don't look like Anna at all, but perhaps I share with her a desire to travel and a curiosity about the unfamiliar. I am savoring this link to the past as we plan our week-long road trip to Lofoten, followed by a trip across the mountains from Trondheim to Sogndal, where we will celebrate my uncle Arne's 90th birthday.