My grandmother, also the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, had grown up with two healthy brothers and inherited money from her father. She was entirely different from her husband, a female spitfire, and I was a favorite of hers. Entering the house became a ritual. I would throw open the screen door, run through it, and bellow, “Grandma, my sword!” This was her cue to reach behind the kitchen cupboard and pull out a two-by-four onto which my uncle Fredrik had nailed a short crosspiece. She always laughed then, a loud cackle that sometimes made her cough. She was fat but strong, a woman who hauled heavy buckets of water and carried a bushel of apples in the folds of her skirt, who peeled potatoes with a fierce stroke of her paring knife, and overcooked every comestible that came her way. A woman of moods, she had her smiling, chatty, storytelling days and her days of gloom, when she muttered asides and squawked out dubious opinions about bankers and rich folks and sundry others who were guilty of crimes. On her worst days, she would say a terrible thing: “I never should have married Ivar.” When his mother ranted, my father stiffened, my grandfather remained quiet, my mother tried humor and negotiation, and Inga, sensitive to every emotional wind change, whose face registered pain at even the hint of a conflict, drooped. A raised voice, a retort, a sullen expression, an irritable word stuck her like needles. Her mouth tensed and her eyes filled with tears. How often I had wished in those days that she would toughen up just a little.

Despite the occasional outbursts from Grandma, we loved it there, the place my father called “out home,” especially in summer, when the broad flat fields with growing corn ran to the horizon. A rusting tractor, overgrown by weeds, a permanently parked Model A, the old pump, and the stone foundation of what had once been a barn were all fixtures in our games. Except for the wind moving in the grass and trees, the sound of birds, and an occasional car passing on the road, there was little noise. I never gave a moment’s thought to the fact that my sister and I were climbing, running, and inventing our stories of shipwrecked orphans in an arrested world, but at some point, the world of my grandparents, of those second-generation immigrants, had ground to a halt. I see now that the place is a scar formed over an old wound. It’s odd that we’re all compelled to repeat pain, but I’ve come to regard this as a truth. What used to be doesn’t leave us. When my great-grandfather Olaf Davidsen, the youngest of six sons, left the tiny farm high on a mountain in Voss, Norway, in the spring of 1868, he already knew English and German, and he had his teaching credentials. He wrote poetry. My grandfather would finish the fifth grade.