Oma's 89th Birthday!

Well, if your 89th birthday isn't a milestone, I don't know what is! My Oma (Swedish Grandmother) will be NINE DECADES old next year- she was born in 1920. It just amazes me how much she has gone through in her life. She was born and raised on a farm in North Dakota, as the oldest of 8 children, she certainly was no stranger to strenuous life/work on a farm! As a school girl and teenager, she suffered through the Great Depression (no, not this current economy slump, but the real thing!); she has always told me, when I ask what it was like, how thankful her family was to be able to live off the food they grew & harvested on their farm. She met my Opa, got married young, and had to kiss him off to World War II, while she stayed on the homefront nursing their newborn babe. She was only early 20's - just so hard for me to fathom!! In her lifetime, so much history has taken place: The Great Depression, Women's Suffrage, invention of cars, radio, TV, even refrigerators!, World War II, Civil Rights Movement, Vaccines, Airplane travel, Space travel, Berlin Wall, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, Internet, AIDS epidemic, and on and on and on. What we read about in our history books, she was reading about in the Sunday paper, or experiencing on a personal level! What a rich life she has had. The stories she would tell (before dementia) were just amazing - my favorite time with her has always been to take walks together and listen to her stories.

I am thankful to have so many other sweet memories of her; learning to make homemade bread & cinnamon rolls, drinking coffee & eating cinnamon toast in bed, numerous hikes in Arizona near Superstition Mountain, eating homemade cactus jelly, watching her do countless crossword puzzles (she sure loved those back in the day), having her and Opa visit each summer, even some while we lived in Germany, just to name a few.

It was an honor to be able to host the celebration of her life and her role in each of our lives. Happy Birthday, Oma!!