Clarice
Skjonsby

Care, creativity, faith, and quiet magic

A life that made room
for other people.

Clarice Adelyn Boyer was born December 9, 1922, at her family’s farm home near Walcott, North Dakota, to Andrew J. and Minnie Northway Boyer. She was the tenth of sixteen children. Everyone had a job. Bread was baked every day, work was shared, and caring for others was part of the rhythm of life. Her formal schooling ended after eighth grade when she was sent to help care for older relatives-a responsibility that arrived while she was still a child herself.

Clarice married Willard Owen Skjonsby on July 17, 1941. They raised seven children and lived in several communities, including near Walcott, Fargo, and Moorhead. Her care reached five generations. She built a life centered on family. Clarice knew how to create both structure and delight: expectations were clear, the house was kept just so, and there was still room to draw, cook, play, and make things together. To the children who gathered around her, she was kind, steady, and present.

Kitchen magic

Clarice could feed a crowd with what seemed like very little. At her table, every dish had its place. Food was passed from person to person, with pickles and little additions tucked among the main dishes. The meal ended, the dishes disappeared, and the kitchen was clean before anyone quite knew how it happened. In Clarice’s home, dirty dishes did not wait until morning.

Her family still talks about the fried chicken that no one has been able to recreate. Clarice would explain that it was only flour, salt, pepper, and butter-but everyone knew there was something else in it. Her cooking carried years of instinct, care, and love that could never be written neatly onto a recipe card.

Family remembers Clarice running Nana’s Café on Broadway in Fargo, where she rose early to make whole pies for the day. Her table held beet pickles, refrigerator pickles, lefse, chicken soup, sweet soup with dried fruit and tapioca, and caramel popcorn balls at Halloween. Her kitchen wisdom was practical and memorable: “Use your head to save your feet.” Think ahead. Move with purpose. Make the work count.

A quiet presence

Clarice was deeply creative. She sewed, wrote poetry under the pen name CABS, drew barns and cows and picket fences, preserved the harvest, made lefse from memory, and could recall recipes long after she no longer had a kitchen of her own. She loved books-especially devotionals-and her Bible showed the soft wear of a life spent returning to it. She brought grandchildren to Sunday school and carried her faith in the way she listened, reflected, and cared.

She loved birds, and sparrows seemed especially close to her heart. She could whistle like one, and she often hummed as she moved through her day. Her family remembers that humming as part of the quiet steadiness she brought to everyday life.

In her later years, she became even more of an observer. She could sit quietly and watch her great-grandchildren, saying little but communicating everything: amazement, pride, and complete enjoyment of who they were. Their presence was enough. Her own presence made other people feel that they were enough, too.

The person who showed up

For Mantha, Clarice was more than a grandmother. She was steadiness during the hardest chapters-a place where life felt grounded, wholesome, and full of possibility. There did not always need to be a long conversation. Sometimes healing looked like sitting at Clarice’s kitchen table, drinking tea, cooking together, or being quietly cared for.

Clarice’s love was practical. Her hands washed her grandchildren’s hands when they were small. They cooked, painted barns and houses and churches, sewed, gardened, set tables, turned pages, and held generations of babies. Her work also included caring for family, working at a school, and tending a farmstead near Abercrombie. Her nails were nearly always painted, her outfits carefully matched, and she remained graceful and appreciative to the people who cared for her in her final years at Bethany.

Near the end of Clarice’s life, Mantha spent an afternoon carefully painting her nails. Clarice finally told her that no one had ever spent so much time on them and asked whether she had anything else to do. Mantha’s answer was simple: this was what she had come to do. This was how she wanted to spend the day.