There’s a parable of sorts they tell in my family, though I think most of them get the whole thing wrong. Like all mythical Norwegian farms, the farm in this story is home to not just the farmer and his wife, but also to a nisse. A nisse is a mischievous little creature not unlike the Gnome of Travelocity. Unless our good farmer leaves out porridge and other goodies during the long, hard and cold winters, the resident nisse will wreak havoc with the livestock, the winter reserves and the spring planting.
In the story my family tells, the farmer has had quite enough of his nisse. So he sells the farm, packs up the pots and pans, hitches up the horses to the wagon and heads for greener nisse free pastures. When he arrives at the new farmstead, he goes to the back of the wagon. There, he finds his nisse sitting quietly at the end of the wagon, dangling his feet happily and balancing the belongings he has tied in a bundle on a stick over his shoulder.
“We’re finally here,” says the nisse with a wink and a smile.
I always found the story charming and reflected on what I thought was the moral of the story - don’t run away from your problems but face them head-on instead.
But over and over, every time someone else in the family tells this story, the moral is something else entirely. It’s a warning to never, ever leave where you are and head somewhere else. Never. Ever. Leave. No good will come of it. Yes, we have abandonment issues.
And no good has come of moving, by some measures. My mother left Norway the year they discovered oil for San Francisco. She then left San Francisco the year before real estate boomed. And so on. So the message is clear - stay put, don’t ever leave. And I haven’t, for 28 years.
As you may imagine, I’ve been hearing a lot about that pesky nisse lately. I’ll be looking through the rear view mirror for telltale legs dangling into view and praying my interpretation is the right one.
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