My mom was born in Chisholm, Minnesota, in 1925, the second-oldest girl in a family of seven children, three girls and four boys. Her father worked on building the Eisenhower Tunnel through the Continental Divide in Colorado, and her mother taught elementary school and raised her half-Finnish, half-Swedish children. They spent the winters in town and the summers on a farm in the country, picking strawberries and practicing their violins. My mom is awesome.