April 24, 1928- September 17, 2019
Marjorie Mikalson Pederson was a wife, a mother, a grandmother,
a great-grandmother, a revered sister to five siblings, a teacher, a poet, and a wit to watch out for in conversation.
She was born in a log cabin in 1928 in Eureka, Montana, where she lived an idyllic “Little House on the Prairie” childhood. Hardly a day went by in her life when she did not recall the love and generosity of her parents, Barbara and Lawrence Mikalson.
She met Leonard Pederson in 1947, when he was a returning veteran of battles in the Pacific and she was a college student home on vacation.
They had two children, Leonard Jr., (Barbara) of Washington, D.C., and Kristine Stimson (William) of Spokane. Marjorie doted upon and tutored her two grandchildren, William Jr., of Washington, D.C. (Sarah), and Brie Stimson of Los Angeles. Two and a half years ago, she greeted her great-granddaughter, Leah. Leah loved her “GG”. Marjorie is also survived by one brother, Mick Mikalson (Baiba) of Priest Lake.
After her own children entered school, Marjorie went back to college and earned BA and Master’s degrees in education from Eastern Washington University. She started teaching at Broadway Elementary School and then spent most of her career at Greenacres Junior High School. Teaching ninth graders is often thought of as a hardship, but Mrs. Pederson claimed she never met a ninth grader she didn’t love. There was so much that could be done for them at that age.
She specialized in teaching reading. When she read aloud from the works of such favorites as O. Henry, Tolkien, and Ray Bradbury, word would get around and former students would sneak in the back of the room just to listen.
When she found students with basic reading problems, her method was to become a one-on-one tutor until the problems cleared up. She often recalled a tall 15-year-old student who had somehow gotten to the ninth grade still hiding the fact that he was completely unable to read. She worked with him every day and by the end of the semester he got it. Long after he left the class, he showed up again one afternoon and told her, “You saved my life.”
In 2002, Marjorie she published a volume of poems, Amber Beads, that crystalized her views of life. A stanza in one of its poems says:
My garden’s my chapel,
The birds, trees, and sod,
It’s where I find solace,
The place I find God.
An appreciation of her son called “The Teenager” displays in just one of its stanzas her love of family, her economy of thought, and her wit:
Kind to his parents,
Good to his sister,
Once when she was gone,
Even said he missed her.
Another poem listed many qualities of her daughter, then ended:
The task that you accomplished
That will stand out like no other
Is this, our dearest daughter,
You became a perfect mother.
The hero of her life was her husband, Leonard. A few years after they married he built her perfect house in the Spokane Valley and they lived the rest of their lives there. Many poems in Amber Beads describe what he meant to her, including this one:
Warm Comfort
Last night I was about to arise
As you slept in our well-worn bed,
You turned and your arms encircled me
And I stayed beside you instead.
Your nearness calmed and eased my mind
Like a shelter in a storm
Where softly glowing embers burn
And comfort and keep you warm.
We have lain these past sixty years,
Aside in the same old bed
And many a time those loving arms
Have eased away some dread.
And now we both are growing old,
Our two heads white like snow.
That your warmth still is dear to me –
I just wanted you to know.
When Leonard died in 2012, she wrote one of her last poems:
The Last Goodbye
“You’ll never know how much I love you,”
He looked at me and said
As I leaned down to kiss him
Where he lay upon the bed.
I told him how I’d loved him
Since I first saw his smile
And surely when you count the years,
That’s really quite a while;
And as I looked into his loving eyes,
I knew we’d just said our last good-byes.
Now, on days when I feel sad
I still rejoice in the years we had.
And though time has deemed that we must part,
He lives forever in my heart.
God bless you, Marjorie. You live forever in our hearts.
Private memorial gatherings will be held at the gravesite.
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