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Excerpted Inspirations #228

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • May 4
  • 0 min read
[The Solden family has lived in Canada for five years, after immigrating from Germany. In 1939 Anna’s oldest brother Rudi enlists in the Allied army.] Was Mama really so stricken? It was silly. Rudi had not even left Toronto yet. He was still on a naval training ship in Lake Ontario, and before long he would be able to come home on leave. She knew how Mama must feel. Rudi was Mama’s firstborn and favorite child. Still, could it be that Mama just did not know how to stop acting tragic? Anna could remember times when she herself had sworn never to speak to Mama again or made some other rash vow. How soon she had wanted to break her own word, and yet how difficult it had been to stop posing as angry or injured. Mama wouldn’t act that way though. She was not a child. Still, Anna wondered. And the next night, when Mama would not come to the table, Anna got up in sudden anger, filled a plate with food, put it and cutlery and a glass of water on a tray, and headed for that shut door. “She won’t eat it, Anna,” Gretchen said, looking wretched with worry. “Oh, yes, she will,” said Anna. And setting her jaw exactly as she used to do when she was nine years old and about to defy her mother, she marched into Mama’s room, Fritz jumping up to open the door. “Sit up, Mama,” she said in a voice totally lacking in sympathy. “You’re going to eat your supper.” “Take it away,” Mama moaned. “Leave me alone.” “You ought to be ashamed,” Anna said. “Papa is getting pale with worry over you. Gretchen can’t eat. Rudi hasn’t had any letters from anybody because we are all so worried about you. He’s probably getting thin too, and all you can do is lie there and feel sorry for yourself.” She gulped in a deep breath and rushed on while her mood held. “I know it was hard when he first left but that’s over and everybody but you is trying to keep going. I think you’re just sulking by now and can’s stop – but you can EAT so sit up!” Her mother turned over and stared up at the youngest of her children. “Enough of that talk, Miss Anna Elisabeth Solden,” Mama snapped, her indignation a match for Anna’s. “Nobody is going to starve around here as long as I have a word to say. What is your Papa thinking of?” “You,” Anna said, turning, the tray still in her hands. “I’ll go tell Gretchen to set another place.” “You set it,” Mama called after her. “Setting the table is your job.” The others sat like sheep, staring, as Anna plunked the tray down on the sideboard and set her mother’s place with much banging of cutlery. “Wake up,” she said to them all. “Mama’s coming out here. Try to look alive.” Papa burst out laughing. “Bravo, Anna,” he said. “I thought that temper vanished years ago.” “Not when I need it,” Anna said. But suddenly she felt her knees wobble. Then a familiar voice spoke from behind her, not the sad voice they had heard since Saturday, but Klara Solden’s brisk, sensible one. “Set that child down on a chair, Ernst, before she falls over,” she said. “it’s not every day she gives her mother a good scolding. When you said I was sulking,” she went on, looking at Anna, “all at once, I knew you were right. Me, sulking! At my time of life. I can’t think where you ever learned to give a tongue-lashing like that?” She gave Anna a suspicious look. Anna gave back a demure smile. “From Papa, I think,” she said. The family, freed from tension, roared with laughter. Mama herself joined in. Papa had never scolded any of them, that she could remember, and she knew it as well as Anna. -Jean Little, Listen for the Singing (1977), pp. 176-178

 
 
 

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