The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2009, Qupperneq 11

Vol. 62 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
153
The Thorvaldssons
by Irvin Olafson
I have to tell you about Amma Stina’s
new family, the Thorvaldssons. Sveinn’s
first wife was Margaret Solmundsson and
they had 14 children, 13 of whom reached
adulthood. Stina brought 4 children to the
marriage and she and Sveinn had five more
children, a total 22!
My Amma was a quintessential
‘Johannesson.’ The Johannessons were
gentle, kind, intelligent, honest, with a love
of music, and they were used to hard work
and being poor. Sveinn brought a new
dimension to Amma’s life. His was a very
large, prosperous, busy, well-educated man
that, for the most part, went out into the
world and became successful in many
walks of life. Solli, one of his sons, for
example, became a corporate lawyer, sat on
boards of many national companies,
became a Senator and the head of the
Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
Amma managed the Thorvaldsson
household, which consisted of a large home
with six bedrooms, a parlour, dining room,
main kitchen, summer kitchen and well
house. There were two barns, a garage and
a large garden. There was usually a maid
and handyman to help with the chores, but
the bulk of the work fell to Stina. She
milked the cows, grew vegetables, pre-
served, processed the wool, helped to
slaughter the animals and made boilers full
of blodmor, slatur, svid, etc. She made
skyr, mysost and baked bread. She sewed
clothes for the children and for many years
found some time to knit me blue cable-knit
cardigans for my birthdays. These sweaters
were beautiful and were my uniform and
when I outgrew them they were passed on
to others.
Amma was ‘the salt of the earth,’ and
could do anything. Sveinn expected for-
mality at the dining table at all times. So she
would prepare and serve dinner, remove
her apron and then take her place at the
other end of the table until she served cof-
fee and dessert. Sveinn carved the meat and
plated dinners for all present, all in a very
formal way. Sveinn who had been a teacher
in his earlier life, asked questions of every-
one present, ‘what did you learn at school
today?’, ‘what is the capital of
Mesopotamia?’, etc. Needless to say it was
nerve racking, especially for me as I had, by
this time, developed a respectable stutter.
Amma Stina kept a gallon jug of
Newfie cod liver oil on hand for me. She
believed liberal swallows of this terrible
elixir would cure my stuttering. Needless
to say it didn’t, the mere thought of that jug
aggravated my condition. However, I did
get an orange (an exotic fruit for Riverton
in those days) or some other treat for being
compliant.
When Lois Sigurdson and I were kids
several of us would go over to Amma’s to
play eevy-ivy-over with Violet and Irene,
Stina’s daughters. This was a game where
you threw a ball over the garage and yelled
‘eevy-ivy-over.’ The objective was to catch
the ball before it touched the ground and
then throw it back. Another game was
knock-the-tin-can, a very distant relative of
cricket. Amma would always come out
with lemonade or raspberry vinegar and
peanut butter and jam sandwiches made
with 'homemade bread’. I can still taste
them. I lived next door at the time and I
knew how hard she and my Aunty worked
and it amazed me that she took the time to
look after us in this way.
My sister Christine lived with Amma,
while I lived with Auntie Sella. Christine
and I were very close. She still reminds me
that I needed her as my mouthpiece when
my stutter was particularly bad. I remem-
ber making a play house out of hay bales
out in the meadow. It looked like a regular
pile of bales but the interior was open with
a missing bale for a window and another