BESTE–AN EXCITING LIFE.

BESTE—AN EXCITING LIFE. I posted previously about how the people we meet generally have lived more exciting lives than the characters we read about in novels. We now have on our walls photographs of my maternal grandfather’s parents, taken when they were young, perhaps around 1880. My great grandmother has a remarkably bland expression, hair parted in the middle and severely combed. The photos were taken at a time when people chose expressions which they could hold for a period of time without moving. We have another photograph on our walls of my great grandmother, taken with her grown daughter and one of her three sons. This photo must have been taken over twenty years later, but she looks exactly the same, with the same remarkably bland expression. And yet her young husband, who looks so handsome in his uniform (he was a Danish dragoon), had died of pneumonia when he was 27, shortly after the first pictures were taken, and the picture with the two adult children was taken in this country. I knew her as Beste (short for bedstemoder, meaning grandmother). The photographs don’t help me imagine the heartbreak of being widowed young, with four children, and the adventures which led her to live on the other side of the ocean.