The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2004, Blaðsíða 26

68
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 59 #2
job on Wednesday afternoons. Every
Wednesday after school, the six of us
would head straight to Amma’s house.
Amma often made pannakokur (Icelandic
pancakes) or pies for those Wednesday
afternoon visits, washed down with cups of
hot tea. Despite her Icelandic heritage,
Amma was always a tea, rather than a cof-
fee drinker. Her pies, especially the raisin
variety, were some of the best we had ever
tasted, although the crusts sometimes got
left on the plate. Amma learned early in life
to scrimp on ingredients to make them go
further and that sometimes meant piecrusts
that were anything but flaky.
We treated Amma’s house as if it were
our own. Indeed, for one of us, it WAS
home. Amma lived with an unmarried son;
when he died in 1972, one of my brothers
began sleeping at Amma’s house so that she
would not be alone at night. Every school
morning, we would phone to make sure
our brother was out of bed and ready for
the school bus. Amma was hard of hearing
and did not always hear the phone and our
brother slept upstairs. Sometimes it took a
long time for the phone to be answered. In
those days, we had party lines, so neigh-
bours several miles away would hear the
ringing phone. Just recently, I heard one of
those neighbours reminiscing about the
days when the phone would ring and ring
to get my brother out of bed.
My brother continued to live with
Amma until she moved to the care home. It
seemed appropriate that when he married
several years later, he and his new wife
made their home in that same house.
Amma’s house was a treasure trove;
you never knew what you might find.
Amma saved everything from wrapping
paper and ribbon to old letters, newspaper
clippings and recipes. She filled scribbler
after scribbler with recipes, some of them
pasted in, others pinned in with a straight
pin. She clipped favourite stories and news-
paper articles and tied them in rolls with
ribbon. We used to call it “Amma-itis” -
this predilection for refusing to throw any-
thing away. It must be a contagious condi-
tion, for several of us caught the bug our-
selves.
Although her formal schooling never
went past Gr. 4, Amma taught herself to
read well above that level. She preferred
non-fiction to fiction and particularly liked
accounts of prairie life. She best liked sto-
ries written By women.
“When a man writes a story, there has
to be a hero. Stories written by women are
more like real life,” she used to say.
Amma also loved to knit. In earlier
years, she carded and spun her own wool.
Every grandchild received a wool-filled
comforter when they married and we all
had scarves, mitts and socks knit by her.
They were durable and practical items,
made by hands that knew the value of those
traits.
It is difficult to think of Amma with-
out thinking of her chickens. Every spring
she would make the trip to Portage la
Prairie for her chicks. It was often her only
trip to Portage each year and it was pre-
dictable as spring itself. She would come
home with her chicks, a new straw hat and
Amma and the twins