Anonymous
To Gwen, Judy, Roger and Peggy and your families - -
what a lot of memories the obituary of your dear Mom, Marie-Lou brought back .... here are a few, not in any special order ...
when did we first meet? Hans met your Dad, Bill, just about the very day he first came to Grand Haven in July 1959. Your parents helped Hans find room and board with Mrs. Klepac, just widowed. It was a good match and Hans remained there until we, Hans' family arrived just before Christmas in 1959. You all were a few years older than our Henrik and soon came to help with baby- sitting. I do recall Roger romping and playing with Henrik. They both seemed to have fun with all those toys ...
Then there was Peggy's wedding, so romantic, different for those days .... and typically Ferm family.
Again: Gwen, the hairdresser, had a special requirement for her graduation from beauty school, wasn't it? The family got involved, of course, all in wigs and costumes and portraying a musical group. It surely was special.
Judy seemed so proper and serious, despite those red locks. didn't you become a nurse, marry and settle further north in a very beautiful part of Michigan?
Hans should help my memory with this - it seemed that we all went salmon fishing in your territory?
(He is sleeping this very early in the morning)
You all grew up in a different fairyland that your parents created as your home in that pretty corner of West Spring Lake/168th (right? it is many years ago!) We recall the water, the willows, the house that grew as needs arose: the veranda that became home to more than 120 chattering parakeets - - the extra space needed to house all those organ pipes and all that good music, always music - - the horsey in the living room and don't I remember the horse sticking out its head from a big pink Cadillac?
Once Mary-Lou and I were in your library. She was looking for a book that just wasn't there. "Oh", she said, "just wait a few minutes, it will be there." Sure enough, in about ten minutes it was there. How? I still don't know. That was Mary-Lou and one side of the good witch. She was bewitching and she seemed to always bewitch her husband, Bill.
They got themselves a monster of
a houseboat. Didn't they themselves paint it in a somewhat unusual shade of green? They went allover with it and had a lot of fun, meeting all kinds of new people. No matter what they did, they did have a grand time.
And they did it their very own way.
One of their hobbies was rock-hunting and collecting and meetings and trips that led to rather elaborate equipment and gem-making and jewelry and silversmithing. ML kept very active long after Bill had to leave you and us all. She made a beautiful silver ring for me that we designed together, and a black jade pearl necklace, some other black jade pieces that we still have. Didn't they get that black jade from a place in Northern MI?
In the mid-1970s I had made some teakwood thin Christmas tree ornaments in starshape and Swedish peppercookie shape. She embellished them beautifully with thin silverthread: "G" for Gerd, Henrik's Grandmother and on the reverse side:"1975"; on some of them were just the year. We have two or three of them for our own Christmas tree to this day... The rest were given as Christmas gifts and sold in a studio art gallery belonging to Emilie and Bernard W. Baker of Spring Lake. Those were fun and creative years for all of us.
The early 1980's brought big changes into our lives and we moved from Michigan. We lost track of ML for a while.
One day we got a phone call from old friends, also from MI: They had greetings from an old friend of ours and it just happened to be Marie-Louise Ferm. (Actually, we never realized that ML was that many years older than we, she always seemed ageless.)
They had joined a nudist colony in Florida, all three of them and had been sitting around a big pool with drinks in their hands..."and", said one of them,"you know, when one sits around a pool like that in the nude, one just does not remain a stranger for long ..