Therapists at Mid-Sound Mental Health often joked that all their phone calls were emergencies, but Kelda startled, dropping her pen, when the emergency-call buzzer rang through to her office. The receptionist rarely interrupted a session in progress.

“Kelda Hansen here,” she said, turning away from her clients, a bickering mother and daughter in her office for a pre-counseling interview.

“It’s your Uncle Ragnar, he’s took a turn, he’s took to his bed refusing to eat.

“Emma?” Kelda said, aware that the emergency was in her own family, not one of her client’s.

“Yes, it’s Emma, come to the Landing for my regular cleaning. This is long distance on his telephone, you’d better come see for yourself the turn he’s took.”

The line went dead. Kelda put on her professional mask for the sad-faced mother and scowling daughter sitting across from her. Theirs was a court-order case, a domestic dispute that escalated from shouting and shoving to serious assault when daughter tried to stab mother with a kitchen knife. Mid-Sound Mental Health acquired half its clients from the courts, and. Kelda got stuck with most of them based on her years of experience.

. . .

Kelda needed to get to the Landing, to her Uncle Ragnar who had been father to her all her life, and mother too, since her fifteenth year. She’d hoped to move back to the Landing when her younger daughter entered college, but Arne, her husband of twentyfive years, argued that two incomes were necessary to meet the girls’ expenses. He complained about the old Hansen house, the upkeep it required, the ownership problems with four names on the deed and the fact that two of the owners, Kelda’s older brothers, didn’t do squat.

She’d tried to assure Arne that she could get work in the Poulsbo area; she even urged him to set up an office there, a satellite to the one he had in Edmonds. Their home and their respective offices were only twelve miles from the Landing as the crow flies but at least an hour and a half by car and ferry. They lived in an Arne Hedstrom Construction home, over four-thousand square feet of luxury, the latest lovely Arne-built house of their married life. Of late she’d found the luxury discomforting.

She grabbed her laptop, pager and cell-phone, and buzzed Rachelle. “Cancel my afternoon appointment and evening class. I’m headed for Hansen’s Landing. I can just make the ferry.”

Kelda paced the passenger deck of the Rhododendron, and glanced back at Edmonds, once a sleepy waterfront town north of Seattle, now in danger of becoming part of a metropolis. Homes started at the water’s edge and climbed the hills where thick forests of Douglas fir, western red cedar and hemlock once grew. Her grandfather and uncles helped deplete those forests. Her husband built expensive homes on the hillsides, and reminded her that trees he removed for his developments were second-growth; her family took down the good stuff.

Each thrum of the ferry’s engine pulled pain from deep in Kelda’s brain to rest behind her eyes. She skirted other passengers and concession machines where trapped air tasted of over-warm bodies and stale coffee, and pushed against a door made heavy by the wind to reach the outside deck. The day was April-clean, with drifting cirrus clouds. She filled her lungs with salty air. It smelled like Hansen’s Landing and her youth. Uncle Ragnar couldn’t die yet. She still needed him.

According to Hansen family legend, she’d been born to the land purchased by Helgar Hansen and protected by his Magna, who birthed seven healthy logger-sons and three frail daughters. All three girls died within days of their births. After burying her third baby girl among the cedars above the cove, Magna wrote, “One day there will be a Hansen woman strong enough for this land. She will be born to one of my sons, but her spirit will come through me, from Hardangerfjord. From the islands of Norway. My spirit is the ship that will carry her through life. Men may clear and plow the land, and erect buildings, but it takes a strong woman to manage it all.”

So it was and long had been. Kelda’s mother, Lydia Berg Hansen, chose the name from a book Magna brought from Norway in 1889.

Kelda: from the ship’s island. Ronalda: strong. Hansen: patronymic family name for three centuries.

Kelda is the pivotal character in my novel HANSEN’S LANDING.

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