Manna From Heaven... well actually, Minnesota

This morning, while juggling a thermometer in one hand, a fussy/sick baby in the other and chasing a little boy all over my dusty house (Toby's drywalling our new office), I heard a sharp rap at the door and looked up just in time to see a delivery guy walk off the porch.

I opened the door and picked up the package and read the label. The address was ours but the name wasn't. By then, the delivery guy was gone.

Then I read the return address: Lena's Lefse in Minnesota and I could smell the aroma coming from the box. I immediately wondered what it would be like to eat lefse in Nebraska and if I would be tampering in somebody's mail by opening the package since it had my address on it but somebody else's name.

Every holiday season, I go through our grocery aisles and search intently for lefse. I asked around a bit the first year and the only response I got was, "Excuse me?" And then they'd ask, "How do you spell it ... l-e-f-t-s-u-h...?"

Wrong suh! It's l-e-f-s-e.

"Hm, you say that 'lefsa'? Never heard of it. Is it food?"

And then I'd try to describe to them in words the scrumptuousity of this delicious Norwegian potato tortilla.

They just look at me like I'm nuts or definitely Norwegian -- which I probably am both.

So, with this fragrant box sitting on my counter, I called our friendly neighbor lady who also happens to be part of the neighborhood gossip party and asked if the last name on the box rang a bell. She said she'd ask her contacts and get back to me.

About 6 hours later, I got a call from her. She said she asked several other neighbors, looked in the phone book for the name and even asked the mailman but nobody recognized the name. She advised me to call the post office.

I couldn't find that number and plus they were closed so I decided to look Lena's Lefse up on the web. I'm so thankful for the internet.

Found the number and called and the lady I talked to remembered writing out the address. She said that since there were no people with that last name in Seward, we could just keep the box since the lefse wouldn't be fresh by the time I sent it back and she sent it to the right person.

I couldn't believe it. There were 25 pieces of 15" round lefse in the package. I thanked her wholeheartedly and emphasized it by jumping into a long-story-short speal about where I'm from, where I live now and how I can never find lefse here. She was pleased. I'm sure any of the rest of the neighbors would've thrown the stuff away because non-Norwegians don't usually care for it. Especially Germans. (Toby's German and doesn't care for it.) How our address got on there I'll never know but I'll never forget how we got lefse for the first time in Nebraska.

By the way, we shared some with our friendly neighbor and her husband because they've had it before and I knew they were one of few who would appreciate this Norwegian manna.

Side note: I noticed that not even my spellcheck recognized "Norwegian" or "lefse." This must be a German computer.