Dakota Blues by Lynne Spreen Page B

the keys on the piano while Lorraine’s husband Jim plucked at a guitar. Uncle Rudy opened a black case and lifted out a long, skinny accordion. The bellows were hexagonal and edged with mother-of-pearl. Rudy slipped his hands into the straps at both ends, looking up at Karen from under bushy white eyebrows. “It’s a concertina, almost a hundred years old,” he said, fanning the bellows. “My father brought it with him from the Banat, in Austria-Hungary.”
    “I’d like to hear it.”
    “We should be done warming up about the time everybody’s through with dessert. Go on and get some for yourself.”
    Karen went back to the kitchen. Without a break in the gossip, the women scooted their chairs aside to let her into the circle. Joan was showing off her new wood-burning kit. “This angled thingy here? You use it for edging,” she said. “Say you’ve got a picture frame you wanted to gussy up, you can personalize it with designs or lettering or what-have-you. There’s even a tip for calligraphy. See here?”
    “You guys are all so creative,” said Karen. “I’m in awe.”
    “I crochet,” said Aunt Lizzie. She wore a faded blue shirtwaist and knee-highs that were rolled down to her ankles. “My specialty is baptismal sets.”
    “Some of the ladies around here have gotten real good at quilting,” said Lorraine. “They were even featured on TV recently. On the Today show.”
    “They’re famous,” said Aunt Lizzie.
    “Famous is relative,” said Joan as she packed up her woodworking tools. “Remember we are talking North Dakota.”
    “I wish I had time to be creative,” said Karen.
    Joan shrugged. “It’s no big thing. Gals around here are used to working hard, and when the kids grow up and move away, they don’t know how to stop. So they find other things to do.”
    “The men, too,” said Lizzie. “My Earl used to like to garden.”
    “As long as they’re digging around in the dirt or playing with knives, they’re happy.”
    “Many of them paint or do wood carving.”
    “You have to do something, especially in the winter. Otherwise you go crazy with boredom.”
    “Only if you’re retired,” said Lorraine. “Some of us don’t have time to get bored.”
    “Quit complaining. You’ll get your turn.”
    “I doubt it, the way the country’s going. I’ll be working until I drop.”
    “Who wants more cake?”
    Karen held out her plate for another guilty slice. Her aunts and cousins might not wear the latest styles nor do Pilates four times a week, but they knew how to keep their families healthy during a North Dakota winter. They were expert cooks, even if they still prepared food as if their families worked all day in the fields. They could decorate their homes with what they made by hand, and clothe their children with a few yards of cheap cotton from the fabric store. Did the world still appreciate that kind of strength?
    The first jubilant notes of a polka called to them from the living room, and the women pushed back from the table. Karen dug her camera out of her purse.
    The older women scrunched together on the couch, while the younger ones sat on the carpet. Karen found herself singing along with her elderly relatives to a familiar beer-hall polka, and felt both dorky and sad. Aunt Marie, always seeming to sense her moods, squeezed her shoulder. Rudy pressed the accordion’s buttons and moved the square bellows in and out, the mother-of-pearl embellishments twinkling in the lamplight. The women clapped, keeping time, and Karen remembered seeing her parents whirling around the floor of the banquet hall at St. Joseph’s. As a child she had learned to dance with her father, but he was impatient and she, self-conscious. The best dancing she ever did was with her mother, when the bandleader summoned the children onto the dance floor for a twirl with their parents.
    The music brought back another form of nostalgia, reminding Karen of her neighborhood back home in Newport where it