taking comfort in kittens

after a wonderfully hectic week last week, involving being onboard four different ships and some very late nights, i've succumbed to a summer cold. the weather has deteriorated from glorious summer sunshine to dreary rain in tempo with my health. i have the comfort of kittens. and what a comfort they are. i'm utterly depressed and rendered speechless by the latest shooting in orlando and the vitriol of the fundamentalists and bigots of the world (all of whom seem to be filling my facebook feed). not even instagram was safe ground as my own nephew shared a worryingly pro-gun, pro-trump post. i wonder if he even knows what he's saying? or if he's parroting the society around him? it's all too depressing, so i retreat to the comfort of kittens and cups of tea and chicken soup with kale from the garden. and i wish that it would all go away - the terror, the bigotry, the hatred, the guns, the rain and this cold.

the view from here

the last of our long spring holiday weekends is winding down. we got our fair share of most welcome sunshine. after a nice dinner (another of those south dakota beef roasts that have strangely been available in our local grocery store), husband and i took a walk down to the lake. the wind, which had been blowing quite intensely all day had all but died down and we had a quiet moment on what's left of the fallen tree (husband has been hard at work turning it into firewood). birdsong and the smell of verdant summer were all around us as we gazed at the peaceful lake. it was a good way to end the day and the weekend. 

i've had need for peaceful moments of late...needless strife and conflict with my sister has zapped my energy. why are we hardest on those we love the most? i have been reminded that words are sharper weapons than actual physical blows and healing from unwisely chosen words takes longer than a recovering from a physical injury. i wonder at times if you ever really get over the most hurtful accusations? especially if they are bewildering and incomprehensible. i've also realized that losing a parent makes you feel and behave in strange ways that make you unrecognizable, perhaps even to yourself. grief is a journey.

but working outdoors in the garden, or indoors on the new kitchen, or even cleaning, tidying and doing laundry - things where you see the tangible results of what you do - really does help. it eases the mind and soothes the wounded spirit. and so does a moment by the lake, breathing the quiet, letting it penetrate your very pores. 

it will eventually be ok in the end. and if it's not ok, it's not the end. 

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this made me laugh.

"i went paleo and now i hate everything."

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check out the amazing 1917 chalkboards they found under some other chalkboards in oklahoma city.

the outside view from the inside

lego me being buffeted by north sea waves.

i've been quite bowled over of late by all sorts of things...things which have kept me from my usual amount of time in front of the computer. but they've also been good things...an abundance of strawberries that demanded processing into juice and shrubs and jam and such; my mom's visit for sabin's confirmation party (and the party itself); lots of work projects growing in intensity in the push towards summer holidays; and a visit from my cousin. (actually, my cousin's daughter - what is that called? first cousin once removed? second cousin? we're not really sure.) it's all been quite wonderful, but it has cut in on my sanity time in front of the internet.

not our house. if our place looked like this, this would be a different blog post.

both my mom's visit and emily's visit have me pondering how things look around here from an outside perspective. this is a falling down farmhouse and a 10-year project (where we're only 4 years into it) and we're in our late 40s and should have a more settled, prosperous life than the house (and my aging, dirty toyota) may make it appear we have. and while i'm normally quite comfortable with that, when you think about how it looks from the outside, you (and by you i mean me) may start to feel a tad, well, insecure, no matter how much you (again me) try not to.

a walk in the creek with mom.

as for my mom, i know she feels a bit sorry for us with our lack of microwave and fans and proper curling irons. i've lived without a microwave for 15 years and have only missed one on two occasions...once when making homemade lip balm and all the recipes gave microwave directions and once when reading recipes for homemade mozzarella, which also seem to all call for microwaves. neither made me give in and buy a microwave. where fans are concerned, we need one for approximately 3 days per year if we're lucky, so we haven't invested in one. people don't have air conditioning or screens on their windows either for the same reason. the season for those things is so short, we invest our money elsewhere. and as for the curling iron, since i haven't had a perm since 1987 and left my hot rollers behind in 1997, i've been pretty much a flat iron girl. but i'm certain these things feed into my mother's notion that europe is, at the heart of it, a backward, old-fashioned civilization that can at best be pitied. i think she hopes it's just a passing phase for me.

fourth of july wish lanterns (we didn't have any fireworks).

as for emily, who is young and sweet and open and curious and smart and just at the beginning of becoming who she will become, i loved the freshness of seeing things a little bit through her eyes (even tho' it's actually impossible to see what another person sees). or at least what i imagine that to be. and i've laughed a lot today, to myself, as i imagined what she may have seen.

everyone around here will eventually have to build lego

she would have seen that we drink a lot of wine around here. we build lego for fun, tho' we aren't under 12. we eat late. we're a bit casual about doing the dishes after dinner and content to actually load the dishwasher the next day in the interest of hanging out, talking or watching a british crime show. we go to bed late and we sleep in. i dress casually for work, preferably in a superman t-shirt and converse. we have a lot of cats. and bunnies. our remaining hen is a bit mad and insists on spending her evenings up a tree and coaxing her chicks, who can't fly as well as she can, up there too. emily took it all in stride and we truly enjoyed her visit.

summer poppies - just thought they were pretty, so i had to use this shot.

there's something to having a shared foundation. we both grew up in that small town in south dakota. we know the same people. we share crazy family members (some of them crazy in a good way and some less so) and although we have different perspectives and memories of them, that shared foundation means a great deal. it helped us bridge what is arguably a generational divide. we can share stories and memories and fill in the gaps for one another. it was, in short, wonderful. and it made the falling down, cluttered house just a comfortable setting in which to talk about it all over a glass of wine and some awesome cheese and bread. because although this house isn't how we would wish it to be (yet), it is, if nothing else, a welcoming place where you can feel comfortable and relax and have room to be yourself. and by you, i might mean me, but i hope that i also actually mean you.

* * *

what if your password could change your life?

* * *

what is the deal with the anti-feminist women? and why do they have a voice?

30 days of lists: day 25

every family has squirks. my dad hates cucumbers, beets and onions. my mother; she can make ice cream sound crunchy (even when it's not). my sister has loads of quirks, but at the moment, it's the alarming amount of motorcycles piling up in her garage. husband can eat an astonishing amount of chocolate in a very short amount of time and you don't actually see him doing it. he's that fast. and sabin, since she was very little, gets completely squirmy and can't be still right before she falls dead asleep. it's rather uncanny, actually.  and me? i've not got any quirks, i'm sure.

where did they go?

they were here.

they drove me up a tree.

but now where have they gone?

they didn't really drive me up a tree, it just seemed like that's what molly was thinking. my family has continued on to london, stonehenge, omaha beach and paris and their stay here is over. it flew by and it wasn't long enough at all. i'm feeling a little lost this afternoon, amidst the quiet that has descended over the house. i'm very glad they came, even if the visit was far too short.

when no one was home

i read an article yesterday on the nytimes (when it's online it's on not in, right?). it was about how people who have a lot of family stories and a good sense of their family stories are better at coping both with tragedy and with life in general. and it made me think about sabin's craving for stories. every night at bedtime, she wants a horse story or a cat story or a childhood story. and sometimes no stories come to me, but often they do. stories of runaway ponies and broken carts, races up the second row of trees in the shelter belt when the trees were small, stories of first trophies and first place plaques in obscene quantities or that time that we decided when no one was home to teach switch, our calm paint gelding, to drive. we harnessed him up, made him pull a tire once around the driveway and then just hitched him up to the cart and went for a ride. or the other time when no one was home and we let elvira (a goat) in the house and she trimmed all the plants on the front porch. or the other time no one was home and there was a tornado warning and we brought skip's galley lad (a horse) into the basement. and i say "we" to implicate my sister, but i was nearly six years older and probably should start to take responsibility now. tho' that decision to drive her friend home in the chevette at the age of 12 (because no one was home...hmm, that was apparently a theme) is all on her shoulders, as i was off at college by then.

family stories fill our lives. dad's watermelons in the trees one hot summer, tales of warming his feet in a fresh cowpie as he walked to school barefoot on a frosty morning, or that time the old horse dumped him off into the water tank. or was that uncle red? and don't forget the disassembled ball point pen that got him into so much trouble he never picked up a tool again.

husband remembers at about the age of 4, riding his tricycle down to the harbor where ferries were coming in and out all the time and putting the trike up along the heavy beam, right at harbor's edge and careening as fast as he could along the water, precariously balanced and gripping the handlebars of his tricycle. he also remembers being spanked for it and going right back and doing it again.

we are a most complex sum of our stories and we are constantly adding new ones to the equation of our lives. and to think that they enable us to cope makes so much sense. i wonder if, in the contexts where there are no stories, it's there that things go wrong. there where the stories are separate and not shared, hoarded and even concealed. because stories need to be told, to take on the warmth and life of those who tell and those who hear them. imagine what stories are just waiting to be told.

it's a balancing act

christmas. it's a balancing act, isn't it? meeting (or not) the expectations all around - for gifts, for visits, lengths of visits, the quality of the wine, the food, even the procedure around how the gifts are opened. what's strange is that we have all these expectations without really knowing or articulating them beforehand, yet we definitely know when they are disappointed.

we went to møn for christmas, to a house we've visited many times over the years. it's where i first experienced the danish way of entertaining - hours of good food, glasses of quality wine, some more food, a bit of snaps, maybe a game of cards, certainly a lot of laughter. so i think i was expecting that. instead, there was frozen bread, mackerel in tins, boxed wine, television on while the presents were opened, chain-smoking hosts in ill health and repeated, munchausen-tinged stories. a bit of a disappointment, really even if i didn't know what i had expected.

it left me feeling a bit sorrowful...for the passage of time, for how life moves on when special people are gone and it doesn't necessarily move on for the better. for how many utterly ordinary people there are out there in comparison to the numbers of special, unique people. and how they produce ordinary children themselves and how ordinariness is thus carried on and on. and people seemingly do not notice.

sorrowful to see someone going downhill after a hard-lived life of too much drink and too many cigarettes. and how it affects the health and the brain. stories repeated and exaggerated and inappropriate. a woven tapestry of truth, lies, imaginings and memories tinged with self-delusion and regret, peppered with a feeling of bitterness over growing irrelevance.

sorrowful (and a little bit relieved) that it was likely a first and last christmas ever for that particular constellation of people.

life is short. we have to choose things that give us joy and happiness rather than sorrow and disappointment. it pays to be happy. and you can choose it for yourself.

christmas angst

christmas angst. every year, i declare i won't have it and every year, i have it. of course, it's deserved to an extent - i still have a pile of presents for my parents sitting here on the sideboard, not sent. ditto my sister. i tell myself it makes it more exciting to get unexpected presents in january. or february. but i hope i won't wait that long. what is it with me and procrastination?

i found out this afternoon that we were expected already today at the more local family christmas to-do. i never knew that (husband made the arrangements and obviously didn't adequately communicate them). but because of cold weather and bunnies and kitties and chickens that need their water thawed twice a day, we had never planned to go already today - it's just too long to leave all the animals home alone. but i have to admit that now i'm very worried that they're thinking we're horrible not to be there. which may sound like i'm a little paranoid and over-reacting, but we are talking here about a person who didn't speak to us for a couple of years because of a misunderstanding over a handful of smoked shrimp, so you never know.

but we're as ready as we're going to be. presents and goodies are packed, as well as good humor. let's hope that's enough. and if not, it's only one day. but i do just once wish for a christmas free of anxiety.

just another surreal evening with the brainiacs

husband's aunt is about to publish a dictionary. it's a swedish-danish dictionary. and thus far has 25,000+ entries. she's been working on it for ten years. and it's being released online. and she's in her late 70s. i think that's all pretty cool. she had a dinner party last evening to celebrate its impending release.

to say this aunt is eccentric is a major understatement, but it is in the most charming, wonderful way. the family stories of strange meals they've been served by her are the stuff of legend. odd sauces made with eggs, pasta fried in a pan (without boiling first), so i didn't really know what to expect.  what we got were landgangsbrød sandwiches.

it's a slice of bread cut the long way of the loaf. there were lots of different toppings to put on it...shrimp and avocado, swedish leverpostej (much more flavorful than danish--sorry danes), a mix involving salmon caviar and something creamy and i think onions, some kind of sardine mixture (you can tell i really went for that one) and cheese. you then are supposed to pick it up and eat it from one end to the other. apparently down at husband's end of the table, the creamy caviar dish was mixed with a black caviar, which colored off rather purple on the creamy bit. i didn't try, nor even see that one.

she lives in a strangely laid-out apartment in a really fabulous neighborhood in copenhagen--really in the center, right between nyhavn and the royal theatre. the location couldn't be better. it appeared, however, that she needed to cross the common hallway which leads to the other apartments in order to get to her bedroom, but i didn't explore THAT closely.

the woman i sat next to at dinner was quite amusing. she'd been a language teacher for years and we were speaking danish for the first hour or so of the party. then she turned to me and said, "like many foreign speakers of danish, you have trouble with the vowels." well, duh. we don't have ø æ å in english and we generally like our vowels not to sound like we have a hairball or major amounts of phlegm caught in our throats. tell me something i don't know.

soon after that, because the swedish guy on the other side of me joined our conversation, we switched to english. i'm sorry, i just can't understand swedish (or norwegian). i know it disappoints swedes and norwegians and probably danes, but i can't just understand because i know danish. that's how it is. at least for me.

the woman beside me was even more precise in her pronunciation and english vocabulary and rather haughtily told me at one point that the english taught in danish schools is british english, not american. i pointed out that that was all well and good, but the majority of english everyone in denmark is exposed to via t.v. and movies is american english. so there.

but it was actually a really nice evening. to sit around a table in a room lined from floor to ceiling with books on the two major walls is never a bad thing. the people were interesting and i had tons of interesting conversations on topics as diverse as:

• hull coatings (there's been a lot of that this week)
• the historical nature of fame vs. the nature of fame today
• danish sculptor torvaldsen
• elaborate funerals in the 19th century
• how much enjoyment one can get from tattoos
• cold ironing (it's not forgetting to turn on the iron, it's plugging a ship into shore-based power while it's in port in order to reduce emissions while moored in populated urban areas)
• my late father-in-law (several of the older ladies there had apparently been quite smitten with him over the years)
• the danish television series sommer
• babies and the proper spelling of thomas
• upcoming productions at various theatres
• the gang from the old days in nivå (i wasn't there, but now i feel like i was)
• norwegians who sail into the swedish archipelago and drink too much and make noise all summer long 

husband was down at the other end of the table and had a long conversation with a woman who was apparently associated with a mental hospital. it was only towards the end of the conversation that it began to dawn on him that she didn't work there, but was apparently a patient there, who had been released for the party. 

and we only went home after sabin had played so hard with this little boy that he fell asleep on the floor.

in all a lovely way to spend a friday evening. 

now if i could just find my rock. it seems to have gone missing. it's got to be here somewhere, i just don't quite know where.