My throat and chest felt inflated, puffed out like the great frog. The celestial frog who comes each year to swallow the sun and keep it hidden through our long Thule winters. The frog with our sun captured in its chest is one of the most vivid recollections I have from my childhood. It was from a song Mumi sang to me. Most Americans hear the word Mumi as baby talk.
People tend to do that with anything strange to their own ear.
Like the songs, the folktales, that survive only as children s fairytales. Mumi is how we say mother back home. It is the one word I can always keep close, whether my mind is operating in English or Finnish. That frog image was not taken from among the many thousands of songs that make up our famous national epic, the Kalevala. This was a song Mumi learned from her old Lenape friend Mary, who said she acquired it from a Shawnee woman who was a friend of her great grandmother.