“But there is a deeper need yet…to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember; the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” –Frederick Buechner

My grandfather, John Stadum around 1900, with unidentified pals. (John is on the left.) He was in his early 20s.

This photo was a studio portrait taken in Minnesota, where John tailored at a logging camp. He had emigrated from Norway recently.

He was baptized Johannes, in Norway, in 1876, and was ‘renamed’ upon entry to the US in 1889, immigrating with his parents and seven siblings. They settled in Pelican Rapids, MN.

John worked as a tailor for a lumberjack camp before homesteading in Benson County, ND, where he remained the rest of his life. ~shared by @rstadum