I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.
She showed me her room, isn't it good, Norwegian wood?

—The Beatles

When my mother was three years old she ran through a muddy field and came home with polio. I like to imagine her this way, 1945, rural Norway, north of the artic circle, a three-year-old child with ridiculously dark brown hair running fast, as fast as her baby legs can carry her—alone—through a field of heather and cloudberries. Coming closer I can almost see the polio like fairy dust jump up out of the ground and sting her bare feet. She winces in pain. Her right leg goes limp. At the same time I see that she is no longer a child. Turning fast into an adult, her leg has stopped growing with the rest of her. She pauses in the field for a moment while a large metal brace wraps and buckles around the short leg. But she doesn’t stop for long. She moves forward again, walking now on crutches. Too slow! She pushes forward in a manual wheelchair. Still, too slow. Finally, she surges toward me in a battery-powered chair. I like thinking of my mother as a crippled Norwegian goddess descending from the far north, hitching herself to a star, and crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a winged chariot of metal to find herself in a foreign land.

I have pictured my mother this way often enough that the image—crossing from story to memory—seems more real than fiction. If I push further in I can see whole scenes, watercolors of the time before my mother became my mother. Wielding, casting, seizing hold of her life, my mother has always managed to defy the ordinary. Not so much a case of my mother fighting the odds and coming out on top—no, my mother held the odds in her hands and made with them what she wanted. Regal, enchanted, magical, she was more than her experiences—she was a goddess. So I’ve chosen to see her, for twenty years, in fragments of washed out pigment, lovelier that way, simpler too.

Example:

On the northern tundra, a land beyond the tree line, covered in moss and lichens, my mother, just ten years old, sits on the ground in front of a gingerbread church with a swooping roof. The pattern resembles Viking ships, each corner an elegantly arching bow and stern. The wood, walnut, comes from the south, carried slowly by pack mules. Every beam is precious, sanctified.

Inside the church, a man preaches. His words are like songs, Norwegian, a language of lilt. He says prayers to god, certain that the Christian god, his god, is the only god, the father of all earth’s creatures, mighty and good. At the pulpit he speaks softly, but his voice still creeps outside over the lawn and into my mother’s bones.

The sky turns gray. My mother wonders how late the sun will set tonight, how many flower necklaces she can tie before he comes to the door and tells her to “Go home. If you’re not going to come inside, go home and help your mother.”

Their house is small, yellow, and nestled between two other similar houses. A woman comes to the door and calls my mother inside. They sit by the fire and make dinner. Fish again. Carrots and potatoes. My mother looks at the woman, a stranger somehow, and wonders who this person is, whose house was she sitting in? Did she live here? Could it be? This drab and lonely place. Somewhere in the hair rising along the nape of my mother’s neck she sees that she is already a grown woman, a full and soaring spirit, trapped in this little girl body. She touches her right leg. The metal brace is cold. It sends a shock through her arm. It is her power. She leans her foot hard on the ground and feels a surge of responsibility and control. She must leave this place.

And why not? She runs back outside, flops on the ground, throws off her shoes and her brace, and digs her toes deep into the soft earth. She is bigger than this place. So much bigger than this place. See how she grows straight up from the ground? She sways in the breeze. Her thoughts wander, already miles away, casting about in a foreign land. She is both linked and free.

A chicken comes to attention.

“You see?” she says, “Mr. Chicken, you see? I am already gone.”

My mother did not depart that day, but she knew as a ten-year-old that someday she would leave her home, her family, her land—Norway. Norge. Waterfalls, snow drifts, 2am sunsets. Norge. Giant fjords, massive glaciers, hairpin turns. Norge. And still, it was too small for her. Her heart—I can see it even now—pounding with the thought that she had so much to see and do, other places still to go. Her eyes like chopped walnuts, flecked, reflecting blues and greens, could speak words her parents never expected. Where next? What next? A job. A family.