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When I was in 7th grade, our family moved from the small southern Minnesota town of St. Peter to the miniscule northern Minnesota town of Spring Lake. They used to laugh about the size of the town. “50 people, if you count the dogs and cats,” they would say. The sad truth of the matter is that it was pretty close to the truth.

It was a “fur piece,” as my dad used to say, to school after we moved “up north.” That meant getting up early in the morning, especially when I started attending high school. It was 36 miles to Deer River, which meant the bus left at 6:30 in the morning and we got home about 5:30 in the afternoon. Once winter hit, it was dark when we left and dark when we came home.

This did afford me the pleasure of “sleeping in” on Saturday mornings. Once I would get up, Mother and I had a regular ritual. My dad hated tuna fish, and he insisted that he had to have pancakes every morning. If he missed his pancakes, he claimed he had a migraine headache. (He had migraine headaches many days when he ate pancakes, so I never quite figured that one out.)

Anyway, on Saturday morning, when I got up—which was usually around 10 o’clock—Mother and I would have tuna salad sandwiches. It was best on her homemade white bread. She had her own little added touch: celery seed. She hated the celery some people put in it, as her teeth weren’t the best any more. But she loved the taste of the celery. She had high blood pressure, which eliminated adding celery salt. The day she discovered celery seeds, you would have thought she had discovered a new continent! From that day onward, the celery seeds were a “must.”

As we sat and ate our tuna sandwiches and drank our coffee, we would pull out the catalogs. It didn’t matter how many times we had been through the same catalog, we always pointed out the ones we liked the best.

We had the Sears Roebuck catalog, of course. And there was the “Monkey Wards” catalog. These had fairly good stuff to look at, but they were what Mother called “farmer’s fare.” They had “house dresses.” One time Hank Wadman, a neighboring bachelor, was there when we were wandering through the aisles of the catalog, when we hit the lingerie section. “Wow! Braless evening straps!” he said excitedly, nearly panting at the page after page of offerings he drooled over.

But the real thrill came when we got to the Alden’s catalog. It was “uptown city stuff,” Mother would say, as we pointed to our favorites on each page, dreaming of the days when we lived in St. Peter and could get on the bus and go to visit her brother and his family in Minneapolis. They had high-heels—spikes—that we wondered how people could walk in. There were “real formals”; the strapless, full-skirted, crinoline supported ones. The suits were “just like Mamie (Eisenhower) wore,” Mother said, neither of us ever dreaming that one day I would actually meet Mamie Eisenhower, and even spend an afternoon at their Gettysburg farm.

Occasionally, when the money was good enough, I would get to actually order something from Alden’s. It was usually a practical something-or-other. Like the beige car coat with the Norwegian-type braid and the toggle buttons. Or the reversible skirt that was lavender on one side and lavender-and-white checked on the other side. Or the high heels, which Mother insisted were “much better for your feet”—with the sort of clunky heels, while I dreamed about the white spikes!

Yes, they are fond memories. My mother died in December 1996. Her funeral was on our anniversary, Dec. 18th. We couldn’t go. It was a blizzard, and the roads were all closed. The state police would not let anyone leave town, not even for their mother’s funeral.

I can’t explain how this happened. It makes no sense, but then sometimes life is just like that. The morning of Mother’s funeral I got up and went to fix breakfast for our family. I opened the refrigerator door, and there inside was a bowl of tuna salad—complete with the celery seeds. Yes, I always kept them on hand. But I hadn’t made any tuna salad. I questioned everybody in the house. Nobody had made the tuna salad. As I sat there with my own daughter and ate a tuna salad sandwich, Mother-style, I knew she understood why I wasn’t there with her.

Saturday Morning Sandwiches
By Janet Elaine Smith

1 can tuna fish
1/2 small onion, chopped very fine
mayonnaise to moisten to your liking
1 tablespoon celery seed

Blend together well. Spread on bread or toast. Cut into fourths, diagonally. Enjoy!

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