This sounds great and everything, but WHO was she? What was she like? What was she like as a person? A mother? A grandmother?

My grandma was both an enigma, a mystery, and larger-than-life in your face overwhelming force of creativity, chaos and Swedish meatballs.

She was the president of the local chapter of the Sons of Norway, but not powerful enough to rename the organization to something more gender-inclusive.

She drove around in a station wagon peering out from under the steering wheel with huge tinted glasses.

She was tiny but big, had huge hair, and wore clothes that screamed “I AM AN ARTIST.”

Like many artists, her life was chaotic. Just as she trailblazed the art world or women, her house trailblazed the now wildly known concept of “hoarding”, the remainders of which are still being dealt with today.

And like many artists, she knew little of marketing or business, instead just paying for dental bills with a watercolor, or mass producing a piece against the advice of others.

Her funeral packed St. Pat’s Lutheran church. Some of my favorite memories were sitting with her outside under her maple tree while she told me long tales of her days as an artist. It was hard for me to believe that this little old lady -sitting across from me in a flower print muumuu sipping a Seagrams wine cooler- could be anything but a shopaholic. But in the years after her death when we slowly decluttered the house, uncovering trove after trove of her artwork -some of it hidden for over half a century- it started to make sense. And now, after finally cataloguing over 800 pieces of art, it’s still only starting to make sense. Yesterday, I uncovered a few dozen more art pieces that have been unseen for 83 years. Maybe these pieces are the final clues to the giant puzzle that is Marge Dodge, and she will finally make sense.

~Chris LaRoche, Marge’s only grandchild