For decades my Grandmother Nordstrom received the Pine Bluffs Post in the mail. It would arrive, as I remember, in a roll with a paper sleeve, a band really, that carried my grandmother's name. In the years after we had moved to New Hampshire from Wyoming, my grandparents would come to stay for six or eight months at a time, splitting time between their daughter in New Hampshire, my mother, and their daughters in St. Paul, the twins.
Within two weeks of their arrival, the first Post would arrive with a yellow forwarding label pasted over the paper band.That small-format weekly newspaper carried mostly "local news" about the families and events in its readership area, which included Albin, where my grandparents built and served the Baptist Church. The Baptist Church and the Albin Cemetery were our furthest destination for the day.
After the Ames Monument, we drove out of the mountains into clear skies and warmer temperatures, we headed for Albin, via Pine Bluffs, a town of about 1,100. Some forty miles past Cheyenne the bluffs rise abruptly from the level plains and, sure enough, there are pine trees on its sides and along the top. I had an odd epiphany as we approached: despite knowing of Pine Bluffs for 60 plus years, I had never thought of the name in descriptive terms.
As I-80 reached the bluffs, we turned north toward Albin on state road 215, 17 perfectly straight miles of flat farmland. Huge fields of now-harvested wheat and fields of dried standing corn and sunflowers line both sides of the road. At the unmarked intersection where 215 meets 216 we stopped to inspect a small white frame church that we thought might be "the" church, but it was Roman Catholic not Baptist. It sat by itself among expansive fields. Albin, a small group of houses and buildings, is visible from that intersection, a half mile to the west.
On a list of Wyoming towns listed by population, Albin ranks 130 out of 178. Dead last is a place called Lost Springs with four human beings. Size and scale are important factors out here.
We had wondered how difficult it might be to find the Baptist Church, but we shouldn't have worried. The town is about two blocks east to west with a paved side street running south and another, this one dirt, running north. The Baptist Church is the last building on the west end of town.
Clearly someone had been working in the church during the morning and had, understandably, stepped out for lunch.
The wall to the right of the small foyer was full of photographs showing important stages of the church's history. The first of these photographs was one I recognized. It is a formal portrait of my grandparents with their four children taken in the early 1930s.
My mother and her older twin sisters are hard to tell apart at a quick glance, especially in a photograph of a photograph. [I believe my aunts were wearing dark scarves.] But this picture has particular significance for those of us who belong to this branch of the Nordstrom family; it is one of very few existing pictures of our uncle Dean.
It felt good to have found the right place, to have made this connection, even without someone to talk with. Beside the photograph of my mother's family below a photograph of what I am guessing was the parsonage is a picture of the church building that my grandfather had built. The current structure replaced the wood-frame sancturary in the 1951.
Beneath it is a photograph of the congregation gathered at the front of that church.
We took some pictures and then went outside for more. The view from the center of the street is nearly identical in both directions.
Because the cemetery was not on church grounds as I had imagined, we needed directions to find it; so we crossed the street to the post office. It was 12:20. The post office had closed at 12:00, although we could see that there were two women sitting in a back room working at a table. I rapped on the outer door until one of them came. I introduced myself and asked about the town cemetery, where my uncle is buried. Turns out the town cemetery is not even in the town; it is 3 miles east of town among fields at a big bend in the road.
We drove out there and began our search.
The headstones are a roster of Swedish names -- Larson, Anderson, Sorensen, Palmquist, Pearson, and so on. It is likely my grandparents had known most of these folks or their parents.We looked at rows of these headstones reading the names aloud for about ten minutes before I found "Nordstrom -- Albert Dean -- 1923-1936" close to and partly obscured by a juniper tree.
We stood and looked at it for a few minutes. I was not sure what to think or how to feel now that I had found his marker since I knew my uncle only from a few photographs and from scraps of stories rarely told. He was gone long before I came of age.
the lone member of my mother's family to be buried here; the others are all in Minnesota or other distant places. He was a boy in another life -- a life before his sisters grew into women and married and had children of their own and grandchildren. Now, they are all gone after long lives, my grandfather in his 70's, then my grandmother and my aunts and recently my mother, all in their 90's.
I know I will have other, maybe better, responses after I process this small occasion. But I think now I understand better why my grandmother kept subscribing to the Pine Bluffs Post all those years. She had known virtually everyone in town at one point and had wanted to keep up with their families, the graduations, the marriages, the births and death. She wanted to keep those things alive even if she could not be there.
But there was another reason I had not thought of before. The Post was, in its way, a link of sorts, a connection with the boy she had had to bury so young and then to leave out on the prairie,so far away, in that earlier lifetime.
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