Amid change some familiar spots remain

By NIELA M. ELIASON

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 29, 2001

When my husband and I planned to drive across the northern United States, I knew that I must return to my birthplace, Carrington, N.D. I had my grandmother's address and remembered clearly the two-story white frame house. I was born in the front bedroom at Gramma's house. She said she carried me to the kitchen for my first bath.

Carrington nestles on the prairie. The town, which caters to the needs of farmers, boasts a hardware store where you can buy horse blankets and a restaurant that serves a luscious creamed soup with dumplings.

My mother came from a family of 10. Most of her brothers joined the Navy and went to California as soon as possible, sometimes lying about their age. I remember my beloved Uncle Vigo, who held my hand and took me walking along the train tracks that ran at the end of the tree-lined street. The sound of trains is still a source of wonder and imagination to me.

At the front of Gramma's house was a cottonwood tree. As a small child, I looked just above my head and saw a hole in the tree trunk.

"A troll," I thought. "A troll is living in the tree." I often looked cautiously into the troll hole, expecting something magical to emerge.

All these years later, as my husband and I drove down the street, I watched the addresses and knew that the house would be on the next corner.

There was the corner -- but there was no house. Instead, there was a pile of wooden beams, chunks of wall with the wallpaper hanging limply, here a shoe, there a kitchen sink, a part of a staircase. Rubble. All rubble, my birthplace destroyed.

I got out of the car and walked about the property. The bedroom had been here, the room in which I had been born. A few steps further was the dining room, where my grandmother fed the workers from the family dairy. And here, on the grass in front of the dining room windows, was where I sat as a 3-year old, holding a cat almost as large as I. The delight on my face is still seen in a photo that sits on my desk today.

It seemed that more than the house had been destroyed, that some part of me had been crushed, too. Tears ran down my cheeks as I walked toward the front sidewalk. The sun shone on the train tracks at the end of the street. And there was the old cottonwood tree. I looked for the troll hole but could not see it. My eyes traveled higher, and there it was, 10 or 12 feet above my head.

"How," I thought, "could I have looked into that hole, so high for a child?" Then, I remembered. That was 65 years ago. The tree had been standing here all these years while I had moved away, grown up, married, had children. The tree had been here though winters and summers, growing, serene and silent, sheltering birds, squirrels -- and maybe trolls. We both had grown and changed, and yet, we were the same.

- Write to Niela M. Eliason in care of Seniority, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731. This essay, edited for the Times, won an award of the National League of American Pen Women.

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