Truly Cecilia Endsrud was both a lyric poem and a full symphony. Every little thing she did possessed a soft lyrical quality to it, and yet the total effect of it all was as impelling as a grand symphony. The folks in her hometown, Meadowville, Minnesota, all knew her because she was the pastor’s daughter, and they adored her. She was one of those special people who are always welcome and never out of place no matter where they go, but whose arrival always seems to come as a delightful surprise. Such were her unaffected ways that even if she had walked unannounced into the saloon on the edge of town, I am sure its patrons would have been curious about what had brought her there but glad to see her. Folks had got used to seeing her almost anywhere. She seemed to have a sixth sense when you had a special need, and she would unobtrusively slip in and out of your life, leaving something behind just for you.
Of course she was markedly different from her classmates in high school. But it was not a difference that created a cleavage between her and them. I am told that a full score of them considered her their best friend. She had a way of striking a responsive chord in almost everyone. Especially kids who were unsure of themselves, or who were relegated to the fringe for whatever reason, gravitated to her because in her eyes they were somebody, and they knew it. Yet, paradoxically, everyone knew she could spend hours out in the fields and the woods walking all alone and talking softly to herself, and no one who knew her found it the least bit odd. Spotting her in the distance strolling along slowly, her hands crossed behind her back, they might remark, “Oh, it’s just Cecilia,” and all would be explained.
“Just Cecilia.” Anyone else would have set the town gossips buzzing time and again. But it was “just Cecilia”: Cecilia, whose organ preludes these past five years had brought most people to church early so they wouldn’t miss them, not as showpieces but as the ideal medium for preparing the heart for worship; Cecilia, who might be expected to carry flowers in the same hour to the ailing mayor in his sprawling mansion and to frail Mrs. Wilson recovering in her hovel from bearing their eleventh child; Cecilia, who always had a glow about her whether she was with people or off by herself. There was a connection, folks seemed to know intuitively, between the warmth she shared so spontaneously when she was with people and the warmth she absorbed from God in her frequent times alone with Him, often out under the open sky. No one really begrudged her that time alone. Naturally, a few considered her “uppity,” but they had to keep their opinion to themselves. If they expressed it, every one jumped to her defense. “It wouldn’t do any of us any harm to do a little more thinking and praying ourselves,” they might say.
Her father and mother had named her Cecilia after the patron saint of music. Both of them possessed an enthusiastic love of good music. Both, in fact, were responsive to harmony and grace wherever they found them. But in Cecilia this family characteristic took on a different form. She had little tendency either toward her mother’s musical ecstasies or toward her father’s joyous raptures. In her, music was more like a steady current flowing through her soul, absorbing into itself all the joy and beauty, the grief and sorrow she encountered along life’s way. That is why I refer to her as both a lyric poem and a grand symphony, tenderly responsive to the smallest trifle and weaving all the trifles together into a whole. A person experienced something inescapably musical just by being near her.
She had always been a thoughtful and sensitive child. But when she was fourteen she had an experience that, among other things, made her even more thoughtful and aware of the people around her. She had been given a small New Testament for her Confirmation but had accorded it scant use over the next several months. Then one day she said to herself, “I think I’ll just sit down and read the whole Gospel of Luke because it’s the one that begins with the beautiful Christmas story. It’s true that I get to hear a passage from one of the Gospels every Sunday in church, but wouldn’t it be grand to find out how they all fit together?”
So she took her New Testament out into the meadow with her on that warm summer day, made herself comfortable on the grass under an old oak tree, and opened it to Luke. She told me later that she had to stop often in sheer awe of what she was reading, and to let it sink in. When she was done, she couldn’t move for maybe half an hour. Then she rolled over onto her knees, happy tears running down her cheeks, and prayed, “Jesus, take all of me. I’m yours.”
I am quite certain that from that moment until the day she died, she never knew what it was like not to belong to Jesus.
At this point I am sorely tempted to digress for a page or two and comment on the metamorphosis of my cousin from a playful little girl in pigtails to a young woman you couldn’t take your eyes off. We saw each other only once a year due to the distance between the town in northwestern Wisconsin where I grew up and Meadowville in central Minnesota. The only realistic way of making that trip in those days was by train, requiring two transfers. But we made that pilgrimage every year solely for the joy of spending a week with the Endsruds. Uncle Irv was my mother’s brother, the pride and joy of her childhood. And Aunt Ellie was one of the most gracious women I have ever known. The year she nearly died giving birth to Cecilia, my mother took off immediately to be with her, leaving me in the care of my grandmother for several weeks. That created a bond that was renewed every summer about the time of the second haying. Dad would turn his general store over to Mimi, his assistant, and we would all set off for Meadowville to help Uncle Irv on the parish farm which he worked.
As it happened, we could not make our annual trip during the summer of 1916 because Dad had fallen off a ladder and broken himself up pretty badly. But the following summer he had recovered enough to resume our yearly visits.
It is strange how you tend to assume time has stood still when you haven’t seen friends for a while. I myself had grown at least a foot since our last visit, but I still pictured Cecilia as the scrawny kid I had known two years before. Was I in for a shock!
It took me two full days before I could start treating that queenly woman as my cousin again. Gone were the days when, in youthful innocence, we “played house” or rolled around in the grass, tussling and tickling each other to the point of exhaustion. Neither of us had a sibling, so we made the most of our week together each year.
And that part didn’t change once we’d got used to the new reality that she was a girl and I was a boy. We’d never noticed that before. So although it took more than two minutes of hide-and-seek to reconnect this time, in the long evening walks we took to our old haunts all over the countryside we bonded again, and Jesus was a big part of it for both of us.
I grew to cherish certain things that I noticed about her now for the first time. She had just a hint of the hereditary idiosyncrasies that marked her as an Endsrud. Her nose turned up ever so slightly, her cheekbones were just slightly higher than usual, her chin had a very slight slope inward. Somehow these little touches set off her delicate features from anyone else’s and gave her overall loveliness a unique quality. She was the only person in our whole extended family with silky blond hair, but she shared with all of us the ability to tan well in the sun. And since she loved the sunny meadows and being out-of-doors, her face and arms were always a healthy hazelnut brown. To look at her made you love life!
To look at her! Those sparkling brown eyes made especially for that angel face! When she was happy, joy danced in them. When she was sad, they were deep wells. They were the unshuttered windows of her soul. She did not know what it meant to be secretive. She had never had any reason to be. She had always been loved just as she was.
This is the Cecilia I remember so well—sitting beside me on the barnyard fence talking together quietly, but often also in silence; ambling along beside the woods across the meadow, her head lowered in meditation; fondling a tiny lamb or feeding a nervous chipmunk; trouncing on the hay in the overloaded wagon on the way back to the barn; picking up a dirty little kid on a street corner and planting a kiss on his forehead; gliding nimble fingers lightly over the piano keys and singing softly; or just smiling at me through those bright brown eyes of hers for some reason now long forgotten. I have to admit that more than once, I regretted the fact that we were first cousins.
She was now a freshman at Christiania. The congregation had raised a hundred and fifty dollars so she could go and “study up on music.” She must be sure to come back at Christmas time and play the organ for the Christmas pageant and let them listen to the new preludes she was going to learn at Christiania.
Of course she would be back at Christmas time, she assured them. She loved her God, her family, her friends, and her music.
Of course she’d be back.