Kathy Brant

When I was nine and actively collecting rocks, my great-aunt Martha gave me a gigantic hunk of petrified wood for my collection.  Martha's son found the rock in the iron ore mines on the Mesabi Range in Northern Minnesota where he worked.  It was orange and heavy and larger than any piece of petrified wood I had ever seen.  All of my friends were amazed at its beauty and heft.  I was thrilled. 

Martha, just a whisper under five feet, was a tiny woman with wild curly hair that looked too heavy for her body.  Her friends called her “Fuzzy.”  Born Marta Bergh near Oslo, Norway, her name became Americanized about the time she left grade school to work in a chocolate factory for 5 cents an hour.  All of her 93 years were filled with hard work and not enough money, but Martha augmented her income by making and selling Swamp Root medicine and telling fortunes. 

Martha could see the future in the grounds clinging to the inside of a coffee cup.  When there was just a little bit of coffee left, she would swirl it around to show patterns and "pictures" on the side of the cup, and within these threads Martha saw what was ahead.  Sometimes when my mother wasn't looking, Martha told my fortune!  My mother would always say, "Martha, you know that isn't real."  Martha would always respond, "It's as real as you make it." 

The orange petrified wood has been part of the decor in every home I have lived in--from my first apartment in the basement of someone else's home to the house I now own.  When I look at it, I remember how much Martha loved me, and how much I loved her back.