Two different stories today. Or maybe they’re similar stories but snipped from two different stages. Yes, that’s what they are. But they’re still for you, readers, wherever you are right now.
The leaving. And the cleaving.
*****
Auntie Gracia and her friends (I can’t remember the number of them or all of their names, but there were at least two Carolines) lived on the third floor of our big green house in south Minneapolis in the early 1970s. I was a preschooler at the time—three or four years old—and she and her roommates were college girls. I recall one or more of them working as hospital aides or Candy Stripers while also managing their studies.
I sneaked up the stairs to the third floor to watch the college girls whenever I could. They were kind to me and let me stay even though Mom sometimes called up the stairs and told me not to bother them. My memories are filled with long blonde hair, hoop earrings, soap operas flickering on the tiny black-and-white TV in the corner, and Auntie Gracia drinking Cherry Coke. She would pour the soda into a glass over ice and poke at the cubes to dunk them. I asked her why. “So they get wet,” she said, smiling.
Auntie Gracia and her roommates would sunbathe on the balcony, and the scent of coconut suntan lotion filled my nose and dreams. She used cream rinse on her hair that smelled of lemons, and I watched her wash her face at night. It was a lengthy routine, that nighttime ritual, and she first pulled back her hair with a stretchy, tan-colored headband. She unscrewed a jar of Noxema and let me smell it before she swiped it over her face. I perched on the toilet seat, memorizing the scent of the white cream, and as a teenager in the 1980s, I used Noxema too to wash my face and thought of her.
In those early 1970s summers when Auntie Gracia wore short dresses, I sat on her lap and whined about her prickly legs. She always laughed when I complained and said she needed to shave. She scooped me into her arms to walk across the pavement at the neighborhood swimming pool at Seward Elementary School—across the street from our house—because it was too hot for me to walk on it with my bare feet. Her eyes were kind; she was beauty to me. And because of her, I wanted to be beautiful too when I grew up.
In my teen and adult years, I loved my visits with Auntie Gracia. Stories about her missionary life in Liberia enthralled me. She listened well when I asked for her thoughts on life and children and marriage. About toddlers, she once said, “They’re not terrible twos to me but terrific twos.” She gave my grownup girls books on marriage and men and bought a book about women for them to give to their men too when they came along.
On September 18, 2025, I went to the apartment Auntie Gracia shared in Roseville, Minnesota, with Uncle Bob. She had some special things to give me from Grandma’s curio cabinet, but what she said that evening about relationships with adult children was more meaningful to me than any of Grandma’s breakables: “It’s simple. Just enjoy them and find them interesting.”
I saw her last on November 9, 2025, when she attended the clothing exchange I hosted in our home. She didn’t take any clothes with her that night but enjoyed all the ladies, the social time, and she hugged me warmly before she left.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you too, honey,” she said back. “I’ll see you soon.”
But she didn’t.
Auntie Gracia passed away on February 1, 2026, just six weeks after her pancreatic cancer diagnosis. I shake my head as I try to comprehend her missing from this world.
A person's blip on the timeline is small, the space thin between the here-and-now and the over-there-and-not-yet. But maybe that's our comfort: the space is thin. We know it well.
And so, we live.
*****
In the summer of 2014, twelve-year-old Ricka joined her North Dakota cousins for a week at FaHoCha Bible Camp near Warwick, North Dakota. It was there she saw Snapp for the first time and met his siblings.
Snapp and his family—close friends of Ricka’s North Dakota aunts, uncles, and cousins—attended numerous weddings on the Schierkolk side of the family over the years. Because of the families’ connection, Ricka and Snapp’s paths crossed many times—even though the two of them weren’t aware of each other’s presence. In the spring of 2024, at Cousin Seth’s wedding, however, Ricka saw Snapp—and her life changed.
Ricka asked her cousin Rose, Seth’s sister, to set her up with him.
“Snapp doesn’t do set-ups,” Rose said.
So, the two girls planned other ways to coordinate future path-crossings for Ricka and Snapp in hopes he would think it was his own idea to ask her out. Distance made chance meetings nearly impossible, though; Ricka lived in Fridley, Minnesota, 232 miles away from Snapp’s home in Fargo, North Dakota. Ricka visited Rose in Fargo multiple times throughout 2024 and into 2025, but her dreams were dashed. There were no Snapp sightings at all.
Rose got engaged and planned her wedding for early summer 2025. This was Ricka’s chance. As the wedding neared, word of her interest in Snapp flew through the families, but he was none the wiser.
Ricka walked down the aisle as one of Rose’s bridesmaids on June 7, 2025. Snapp sat among the guests to witness the union of yet another family member of Ricka’s, but would the two of them speak with each other this time? Would he finally notice the tall, blonde bridesmaid as someone more than “Rose’s cousin”?
At the reception, Ricka’s courage flagged; the gathering of guests overwhelmed her. After much coaxing, she found ways to join group conversations where he too was present, but she left the party convinced she had missed her chance. Only later did she learn Snapp’s mother had summoned his sister, Grace, during the reception, urging her to act. Grace got Ricka’s number from a cousin-in-law of Ricka’s and held onto the scrap of paper, the digits scrawled on it, to deliver it to her brother at just the right moment.
At the very end of the evening while Snapp played with his nieces and nephews, his mom again approached Grace.
“We’re going to leave soon, and Snapp is just playing with the kids. If you’re going to do something, you need to do it now.”
The next day, a text lit up Ricka’s phone. Snapp. The message was casual, but it sparked a back-and-forth conversation that continued throughout the week.
God, the ultimate Matchmaker, had a plan: Snapp was traveling to the Twin Cities area (near Ricka’s home) for his cousin’s wedding the next week. Ricka texted hint after hint. Finally, Snapp caught on, and he asked about her plans for the weekend. Her schedule was conveniently clear, so they coordinated a walk for June 13, 2025, at a park in Maple Grove, and it rained on their stroll together. As they bantered and sloshed through puddles, they decided they wanted to see each other again.
Ricka arrived home after their rainy date, but minutes later, Snapp texted, asking her out for dinner that evening before he left town. She said yes and invited all the females of the household—her mom, two sisters, and Grandma Schierkolk who was visiting—up to her bedroom to regale them with first-date details while she changed from her wet clothes into dry ones for her second date of the day with Snapp.
That evening, Ricka and Snapp ate burgers, drove through the neighborhood, and talked. Her dream and his realization merged. He asked her out on a third date the following week to kayak together on Lake Minnetonka.
Ricka and Snapp’s story flowed on with ease. Weekend after weekend, his Toyota wore a path down I-94 from Fargo, North Dakota, to a certain house in Fridley, Minnesota. The Matchmaker’s presence covered the two of them, His well-timed gift delighted them, and they soon decided to reflect His goodness together for the rest of their lives.
On January 17, 2026, Snapp proposed to Ricka outside by a waterfall in Wisconsin. More relatives joined their story that day as an aunt, uncle, and cousins on the other side of the family peeked from the windows of the Millpond house to witness a wintry scene—the kneeling, the asking, and the saying yes to a sacred future together.
And the Matchmaker smiled.
*Has My Blonde Life inspired or entertained you? If you wish to toss a tip into my writerly coffers, here's how you can do it: @Tamara-Schierkolk (Venmo), @TamaraSchierkolk (PayPal), or $TamaraSchierkolk (Cash App)
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka and their husbands (present and future), Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr.
