Love’s Last Cord

Lisa Doerr

Lowell and Nina were cut from much the same cloth. Both were the children of Swedish farmers recruited to America by Yankee merchants needing to fill their ships as worldwide opium and slave markets softened. Both knew how much determination it took after Wisconsin’s majestic pines, oak savannahs and maple-basswood forests fell to clean up the mess and put up enough hay for 5-month winters. Both also knew a love that kept them warm during dozens of those winters.
Over time merchant ships also carried Lowell and Nina’s beans to China and barrels of oil from Iraq to the local Stop-A-Sec. Return on investment for modern global merchants didn’t beat those made delivering African families to Southern plantations or black paste to Shanghai’s opium dens but ports around the world burgeoned and most people were under the impression that the system was working.
Lowell and Nina never saw it that way. After signing up with the Great American Emigration Land Company their families expected rich farm fields ready to plant once they made the long passage to the St. Croix Valley. However, as millions of African families found before them, the Swedes soon understood that they were simply the human capital needed to colonize the nation’s latest expansion. After stripping most of the good lumber from lands leveraged at less than a dollar an acre, well connected Boston Brahmins offered mortgages to the Swedes at $5 an acre. Only decades of dawn to dusk work saw the fields cleared - one stump at a time – crops harvested and mortgages paid.
Fields plowed where maple and basswood once climaxed were especially productive and Lowell and Nina’s families were blessed with many. Unlike so many of their neighbors, their people made sure to never cut down every last tree. They well remembered the sad state of the forests left behind in Sweden’s Norrland where fuel for heating was a rare commodity. Instead, they spent weeks each spring transplanting thousands of the millions of saplings that flourished on the forest floor so that the woods grew bigger and lusher.
Their woods filled many needs. Deer thrived along the borders between forest and field. Spring’s rising maple sap sweetened their lives all year round. Deep roots held back erosion protecting fish and waterfowl in their sparkling lakes.
Lowell spent countless winter days harvesting scores of cords as fuel for many winters to come. Like factory and government men busy accruing their vacation time, Lowell lined the back of his farm yard with simple sheds full of 16 inch oak, elm and maple logs. Even in good times, he wouldn’t dream of spending dollars earned selling hay to horse people and corn to the co-op for fuel brought in from the Mideast or - worse yet - Texas.
Lowell’s determination kept Nina, his kids, grandchildren and many a welcome guest warm through countless soggy Northeasters and frigid Alberta clippers even after his death at 84 years of age. In fact, it wasn’t until six years after Lowell died that Nina saw she would soon be burning her love’s last cord. There was no way she could keep the word stoves stoked on her own. After careful deliberation, the kids and she decided to install a solar heating system. Nina knew Lowell would approve of their ongoing efforts to keep the global merchants at bay.