Written for Zenna's funeral, September 25, 2017.
Part One. Her Early Years.
A life sketch is kind of a weird term. None of us can be summarized by a simple list of statistics. Number of years lived. Number of children born. Number of places lived. Zenna was so much more than that.
Ninety-two years of uphill struggles and joyous achievements can’t simply be sketched, even by Zenna, with all her artistic talent. Instead, Clairene, DyAn, and I will try to paint you a picture of Zenna’s magnificently colorful life, as only Zenna could paint it.
Zenna Mickelsen was born on May 27, 1925, to Henry Noah and Sophia Chlotilda Hubbard, in Moore, Idaho.
She always said “I don’t have a middle name, because, well, Zenna is enough, don’t you think?”
After naming each of their nine children, her parents, Henry and Chloe, could not think of another appropriate name for their tenth, and last child. Merely from genealogy we can gather that Henry and Chloe gave some thought to their children’s names. After all, you don’t just come up with names like Reuel Willard, Lloyd Pollard, Russell Anton, Emma Bergetta, Royal Henry, Thora Jane, Budge Wesley, Lois Edith, and Guy Hubbard without some serious rumination.
Henry and Chloe had such a hard time deciding on a name, on her first birth certificate it only said “Baby Girl Mickelsen”. Baby Girl’s nine older siblings all had suggestions for their new baby sister, and 18-year-old Russell suggested the name Zenna, because he was dating a girl named Zenna, and he thought it was a mighty fine name.
Henry and Chloe didn’t jump on it at the time, but when Baby Girl was only a month old, 18-year-old Russell went into the hills to help move sheep up to Blizzard Mountain. The sheep herder who was with him said Russell was singing “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, No More” when he was struck by a lightning bolt that killed him, his horse, and the five sheep surrounding them. The family grieved terribly for Russell, and because he’d wanted to name his baby sister Zenna, that is what Henry and Chloe chose.
Zenna said she always wanted a middle name, so she could use it, instead of Zenna, but she happens to be their only child who did not receive a middle name. She also hoped it wouldn’t make Russell feel bad that she didn’t love her name, but she said she has always had a great love for the big brother she had never met, and looked forward to meeting him in Heaven.
Zenna started school in Lost River at Sage Creek School. It was a one-room schoolhouse with eight grades.
After her first school year, the family moved from Lost River to a home right down the road from here, on the Ririe Highway. She attended the Crowley School, another one-room school, all the way through fifth grade. In the winter, she rode a sleigh to school with her big brothers and sisters. She remembers the snow drifts covering the fence posts.
Her teacher, Mrs. Marler, would make delicious soups on the big pot belly stove that heated the school. Zenna said Mrs. Marler’s tomato soup and her potato soup were her favorites. I don’t know if Zenna learned from Mrs. Marler, or from her mother, but she fed hundreds of mouths with her wonderful homemade soups.
Zenna told stories of riding in her father’s sleigh to church, bundled up in quilts with hot irons to keep them warm. One winter, her family was quarantined in their home for 6 weeks with scarlet fever. Their entire house and all their possessions had to be fumigated before anyone or anything could leave the house. She said the quarantine was lifted the day before Christmas. She said Santa had a hard time finding their house that year.
Zenna called her sixth-grade year an adventure. Her Grandma Hubbard’s health wasn’t good, so Zenna and her mother Chloe went to live with Grandpa and Grandma Hubbard for a year in Logan to care for Grandma. Her Grandpa Hubbard was the stake patriarch there, so while Zenna was living with them, she received her own patriarchal blessing from her grandpa.
Zenna’s mom would give her one nickel every week, and she’d walk to the store and spend it. She felt like it was a lot of money.
She made friends with a girl named LeRel Rich. LeRel threw Zenna her very first birthday party, with cake and ice cream and gifts.
Zenna loved the school in Logan. Instead of the one-room school, she was with a whole class of six graders, and she said she learned more there than in all her other grades. Arithmetic was hard for her, and she had to work hard to learn it, but she loved to read. Nancy Drew mysteries were her favorite.
After her sixth grade year, she returned to their home on the Ririe Highway and returned to Ucon and Iona schools.
While growing up, right down here on the Ririe Highway, she said she learned how to work hard. She led the derrick horse when it was haying time. She helped milk the cows. She sold cream to a dairy, and was in charge of carrying huge buckets of clean water to the barn to clean the cream separator. Her mother raised chickens, and Zenna would tell us a story about the first time her sister Thora brought her beau Herman, to dinner. They were cleaning chickens, and Herman grabbed a naked chicken and manipulated the wings while he sang the chicken song. “Squawk, squawk, squawk” she’d say, and laugh and laugh.
Zenna and her brother Guy and her sister Lois built a tree house in a tree by the creek at the back of the farmyard. Zenna said she was a tom boy, and always dressed in overalls. Even then, she had the eye of an artist, as she climbed up the tree to the treehouse and sit still in the quiet to look out at the many shades of color she could identify.
Zenna learned how to ride horses, herd cows, and work in the fields thinning beets, picking potatoes, and thrashing wheat. Harvest time was her favorite, because extra people would come to help and the women would cook marvelous meals. Zenna’s job was to have a wash basin outside the door with clean water and towels and soap so the men could wash up before they came inside to eat.
Even though they were taught to work hard, they had fun, too. Henry took children to Heise for swimming, which meant a ferry ride across the Snake River to get there. Zenna’s brother, Guy, taught her how to ride his balloon-tired bicycle. Zenna also loved roller skating, and wore the wheels right off her skates, skating up and down this very highway.
Zenna learned how to make dolls from the blooms of the tall hollyhocks that grew against their home. Dolls with flouncy petal skirts. I wonder, if she ever had an inkling she’d grow up to paint hollyhocks that her descendants would cherish.
Zenna had a pet turtle on the farm. He was the size of a dinner plate, she said. She named him Oscar, and told us stories of Oscar sleeping behind the stove in the kitchen where it was warm, making escapes down the irrigation ditch to the neighbor’s farm, and almost being stomped on by a cow. I told Zenna her stories of Oscar the turtle would make a good children’s book, and she laughed and laughed.
In school, Zenna played the drums in the Iona band, and she sang in a sextet. She sang solos in contests and one time she was asked to speak the Star Spangled Banner.
Mr. Marcelle Bird led youth choirs in Iona, sometimes preparing operettas to be performed for the public. It was during one of these operetta rehearsals that Zenna met a young man named Bill Longhurst.
Zenna said Bill would flirt with her endlessly during choir practice and they became friends. One night at choir, he overheard her saying that she was going to stay overnight with Lois, because it was too late to walk home, and he offered to give her a ride. Zenna said she fell in love with him right then.
This is how Bill wrote about it. “Zenna sat in front of me in the choir seats. Of course, I badgered and kidded and made catty remarks to the girls. I think she kind of liked that. We went out to the hall after practice and chatted a bit. After the next practice, I offered to take her home, and that was the beginning of everything.”
Bill and Zenna began spending much time together. Zenna, Bill, and Bill’s brother Vic, and his friend Ron Olsen, would drive around in their 1925 Dodge Roadster. It had a top that folded down. They would drive and drive, and sing and sing, always in harmony, every song they could think of. They sang together in choir. They sang together in church. For two years they courted, and sang.
Bill and Zenna decided very early on, that if either of them got upset, or they argued, that they would still, no matter what, have a standing date every full moon. And they did their best to keep the date.
Bill and Zenna were married by Bruce Olsen in the front room of the home where Keith and Beth Olsen have lived these many years. After they were pronounced married, they went to the midnight show with Keith and Beth. As they sat in the show, the actor got out his banjo and sang “Why, oh why did I ever get married.” Zenna leaned over to Bill and said “of all the songs that you and I should hear on our honeymoon, it had to be that one.”
My portion of Zenna’s vibrant, colorful painting of a life was just beginning, but the next chapter is for Clairene to tell you about. Zenna’s childhood is truly just the beginning.
After losing the very youngest of our family and the very oldest of our family in just over a month, I began comparing the entrances and exits every single one of us invariably makes in this lifetime.
Zenna’s great grandson, William Longhurst, only lived about 92 minutes. Zenna lived 92 years. We just don’t know how long we will have between our entrances and our exits. We don’t know if it will be minutes or months or years or decades.
This is what Zenna taught me about that:
Don’t leave a kind word on your tongue. Say it.
Don’t leave a hug in your arms. Wrap them around a loved one and pull them close while you have the opportunity.
Don’t sit in a draft when you don’t have to.
Speak up when you aren’t being heard.
Don’t leave an apology unconfessed.
When you mess up, make amends with the person, with yourself, and with your Heavenly Father.
Don’t leave a story untold. Tell it while there is someone to listen.
On one of our last trips to Idaho, I sat in the hallway with Zenna at Morningstar. She was not happy about the idea of moving there, and she had just expressed that lack of enthusiasm to three of the residents who were walking by. She looked at me and said “Oh, Jana. Don’t mind me. I’ve always been imperfect, impulsive, and prone to flying off the handle.” I reassured her, as we sat there on the edge of the sofa, with Zenna on the edge of a new adventure, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but being impulsive and prone to flying off the handle are genetic traits in your family tree.”
She smirked at me, with that mischievous twinkle in her eye she’d get, and said “I did pass that on, didn’t I?”
Zenna learned to face trials. No one is going to get through 92 years of life without a grundle of them. But she was a tough cookie. She would grit her teeth and push through it, whether it was grief, or another surgery, or another broken bone. She moved forward. She moved forward so well, she managed to outlive her entire family. She was the last one standing. The end of an era. The end of her generation. What an odd feeling it was for her to know she was the oldest surviving member of her family.
At ninety-two, she embarked upon her last chapter. Her last adventure here, that would turn into her first adventure on the other side of the veil, but first, there were many chapters of her life on earth to live, and Clairene will paint for you what happened next in Zenna’s amazing life.
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