Where my mother grew up

Lakewood Township, Roseau County, on Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota

Emma and Harold Kling with their three daughters, Audrey standing, Shirley on the left and my mother, Arlene, on the bottom right

When my mother died in 2014, I needed to go back to where she had grown up, the past she had left behind, the parts of her history I had never known, and to stand in the place where she had been born.

Mom was a “deer baby.” Arlene Janice Kling was born on November 17, 1936. Her mother, Emma, gave birth to her alone at home while her sisters looked on, because her father, Harold Kling was out hunting. They lived about a mile south of Lake of the Woods, on the east side of Muskeg Bay, on a farm in the Swedish settlement where his father had homesteaded. And where, I now understand, the land had been designated Red Lake Reservation until a year before my maternal great-grandfather Charlie Kling brought his family north in 1903.

The Kling farm was located in Lakewood Township in Roseau County (marked in red) near the northern tip of the easternmost edge of the county line.

Roseau County is in red on this map of Minnesota

My grandparents, Harold and Emma Kling, attended Mt. Carmel Lutheran Church, the same church where my great-grandparents, Charlie and Ellen Kling, had belonged. It’s where my mother was baptized.

Mt. Carmel Lutheran Church, Rocky Point Road

It is also where my grandparents and great-grandparents are buried. For some reason I have felt compelled to return every year since Mom died even though she isn’t buried here. I can’t explain why standing on this ground seems so necessary, but it does. The land, the lake, the sky, this place calls me home.

Gravestone of my great-grandparents Charlie and Ellen Kling

While I had fallen in love with reading when I discovered Little House on the Prairie, I don’t ever remember Mom telling me she had gone to a school like Laura Ingalls. I would have remembered that.

My mother, Arlene Kling, and her two older sisters attended this one-room schoolhouse. I found it still stands across Rocky Point Road from Mt. Carmel Lutheran Church.

One-room schoolhouse my mother attended

Mom never talked much about what it was like for her growing up on the farm or why she left this place behind to live so far away from home.

After graduating high school, she moved in with her older sister Audrey at a rooming house in St. Paul, found steady secretarial work, and at age 21 married my dad, Bob Swenson.

Mom with her sister Audrey before her wedding in October of 1957

I arrived in July, nine months after an October wedding, and she delivered me at Lakeview Hospital in St. Paul. She gave me a sister four years later. We grew up encircled by the Swenson family of north Minneapolis with lots of cousins close in age, sharing birthday parties, holidays, and meals together.

We saw our Kling relatives less frequently.

Yet, my favorite childhood memories are of the times we spent with Mom’s family up north.