How Swede it is!
Calif. woman’s romance stretched yrs., miles
She was the author of my family’s greatest love story.
By the time my grandmother, Caroline Wasserman, reached age 65 in 1972, she’d raised three children and taught hundreds of students in California.
As a young woman, she went to socialist summer camps and later joined (and left) the Communist Party. When FBI agents interviewed her as a subversive in the 1950s, she served them tea. She had a master’s degree in education but once used a swear word that began with the letter F in a Scrabble game, earning a triple word score worth 54 points.
Ten-year-old me lost the argument and the contest.
Five years after her marriage to my grandfather ended, when Caroline still felt the sharp loss, she got a letter from her friend Greta, a Swede she’d met at one of those socialist summer camps. “Come to Sweden, dear,” she wrote. ”
After a long flight to Stockholm, Greta picked her up in her Volkswagen and they made the two-and-a-half-hour trip to central Sweden, bumping along a dirt road through forests studded with sparkling lakes to a farming hamlet near the town of Kopparberg. Everything was so bright. So green in the summer light that it reminded my grandmother of her family farm in Minnesota. Her heart lifted.
When they reached the farm, they were met by a handsome man — shirtless in that first encounter, showing off the muscles on his trim, 40year-old frame. Uno Jansson’s family had owned the farm for generations. There was a small house, a two-story barn for the cows, an ancient henhouse and the cabin Greta rented. The property extended down to Norrsjön, a big lake full of pike and perch, where Uno expertly used a pole and net to fish from his little boat.
Uno kept a small herd of Charolais cattle and farmed the old way, with scythe and pitchfork. He hand-smoked fish in a little grotto he’d built. Potatoes were stored in an earthen cellar cut into a hill. During winter, he’d trudge into the woods with his .30-06 rifle to hunt elk and moose, which he butchered himself.
Caroline was interested. Her former husband, my grandfather, was a brilliant intellectual, author and university professor. Uno, with his Abraham Lincoln beard and earthy ways, seemed exotic. Where my grandfather was a genius of letters, Uno was a genius of the manual arts. When they met, he spoke no English, and Caroline spoke no Swedish. He was reserved and quiet.
About a week after she and Greta arrived, Caroline made the first move. She invited Uno for a swim in the lake one afternoon. He accepted. They strolled down the hill, the 65-year-old grandmother of two and the strapping man of the land 25 years her junior,and set off in his motorboat to a small island on one end of the lake.
Thinking Swedes had no inhibitions about nudity, my grandmother stepped out of her clothes and jumped into the water. Uno was first stunned, then amused, then quite taken with her. After dinner, Caroline told Greta she was going to stay the night with Uno.
The next day, Caroline left with Greta to return to Stockholm, but she and Uno promised to write each other. Back home, she took his letters to a Swedish friend to translate. Uno subsequently asked her to live on the farm. And she did, the following spring.
Their love story blossomed. Uno insisted on learning English and Caroline insisted on learning Swedish. When they were apart, they’d write letters that were striking in the honesty of their romance. Over time, Uno became quite fluent, and Caroline proficient. A famous Swedish documentary filmmaker featured Uno in a film on Swedish farmers that played on the national television network. Caroline wasn’t in the film. It would have knocked the narrative sideways.
For 22 years, Caroline traveled to Sweden to spend six months to a year on the farm. Mostly, she was there during the summers. Eventually, Uno came with her to California after another farmer boarded his animals. Of course he couldn’t resist repairing her house.
Inevitably, their age difference began to tell. Although they cared deeply for each other, my grandmother’s increasing infirmity in her eighties made things difficult for both of them. In 1993, she came home from the farm for good. Uno accompanied her but soon returned to Sweden.
My grandmother died in April 1994 after being hospitalized for double pneumonia. Uno wrote a heartfelt letter that was read aloud at the service.
He stayed on at the farm. One day he fell off a ladder he had climbed to fix a hole in the barn siding. He was found by a friend who got him to the hospital, but he never fully recovered. He died during surgery in 2004.
I flew to Sweden to attend his funeral and afterward visited the farm where I spent so many wonderful days as a boy. Some of Caroline’s things were still there: the piano she played in their living room, her watercolors of the farm, a large format book of Ansel Adams photography. And in the bottom drawer of a small cabinet, I found their letters.
He’d kept them all that time, carefully bound together in red ribbon.