what you plant has a way of growing

we had a bit of rain of late and now the weather is warm, so the garden is going crazy. the zucchini is abundant, as are cucumbers in the greenhouse and the tomatoes are loving this warm weather and starting to come on. my broad beans are finished and i only had a few purple (green) beans. my spinach has bolted. the indigo is ready to play with (maybe this weekend) and i'm picking the first real bouquets of dahlias this weekend. i've decided i love zinnias (they're now in my top five with lilacs, peonies, ranunculus and dahlias). i have one huge white pumpkin (and a few small ones). i'm going to have a good supply of hokkaido squash, which i have to find a way to store and keep into the autumn. i'm drying herbs and freezing them down to cubes (with olive oil, i'm looking at you, basil) so that next winter future me will thank present me. but most of all, i'm enjoying hanging out there at the end of my days, watching my lovely indian running ducks, who are so quirky and sweet and shy but curious and rather talkative and social despite their shyness. 

all of this contentment in the garden coincides with contentment at work. i've recently had an enthusiastic go-ahead on two things that i proposed and i'm feeling very positive about being given time and space to just make cool shit. that's all i really want to do. i don't want to be anyone's boss, or get a big promotion. i just want to work with great people and make things i can be proud of, while having a bit of fun. and i'm in the position to do that now, due to the seeds i've planted. what a great feeling! maybe we really do reap what we sow. how did it take me so long to learn that?

can you have a kitten for a spirit animal?

we have to take our sunshine however we can get it these days. what you can't really tell in this photo is that the sun was shining brightly simultaneously with it pissing down rain. i'm not sure why the rain didn't show in the photo. maybe because of all of that dazzling green. or maybe it's demonic rain that doesn't show on camera. whatever it is, i swear it was raining.

the weather has sucked for weeks now and it's affecting my mood. the dismal danish election results didn't help. we knew we'd landed in the middle of the danish countryside equivalent of orange county, but learning that 41% of the population in our area voted for dansk folkeparti, the most xenophobic, conservative, right-wing party in denmark, was disheartening to say the least, especially with their attitude towards foreigners, what with being one and all. i'm still not over it. and neither is husband. he's now joined two political parties, to try them both out and see which one is for him.

at least we have kittens. they do help improve my mood. i was feeling a bit down and decidedly headachy at one point today, having one of those (thankfully seldom) moments of reading facebook and feeling like the whole world has a way better life than me, and the kittens scrambled up to me and proceeded to bombard me with their cuteness until i felt better. cats are the best therapy.

i also spent some time weeding in the garden and watering in the greenhouse. that helps too. there's something just so honest about weeding. you can't get around it and it just takes the time and effort that it takes. and it's so strangely satisfying. so much of what we do today is ephemeral, just a series of 0s and 1s when it comes down to it, but weeding, you can literally feel between your fingers and you can actually see the results of what you've done. it's so wonderfully analog. and there are days when that's precisely what one needs. but a kitten or two doesn't hurt.

i wonder if a kitten is my spirit animal?

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there is a real (im)migration crisis going on in europe

and this article (in slightly strange norwegian english) brings it home.

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a bit of inspiration from

seven decades of soviet photography.

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and for a laugh?

buzzfeed showed pictures of danish stuff to non-danes.

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if you're listening to season 2 of the start-up podcast,

you should read this piece on their feature company.

holding on

it's time for a new toothbrush. i bought this one last november when i arrived in sioux falls without my luggage. after 15 hours on various flights, i was desperate to brush my teeth and insisted that my sister stop at a drugstore so i could get a toothbrush and toothpaste before we went to the hospital to see dad, who lay dying at the hospital. and somehow, this toothbrush has gotten bound together with dad in my mind and i can't bear to replace it. it's funny how that happens, how an ordinary object takes on a magnified significance in your mind.

i read a guardian piece yesterday about the significance of words when someone dies and i've been thinking about it ever since. i realize that i felt the opposite of author gary nunn about those words of condolence that people offered. the distancing phrases like "passing away" infuriated me, causing a slow boil inside that i had to keep bottled up. and everyone's need to say something or express how sorry they were also filled me with a rage that i had to stifle. i understand fully that people feel they need to say something, but losing dad felt like something that was mine and my mother's and my sister's and that no one could possibly understand it or be as sorry about it as we were. it felt private and solitary and so profoundly singular that no one else should have the right to say anything. i wanted to scream that at them and i wanted to run away from all those empty words that weren't going to bring him back.

and i guess in a way that i did run away from it, flying to london, determined to finish a project that i'd worked on for months. i don't regret doing that because it's the one gut feeling i had in the whole experience - that dad would think it was the right thing to do. but looking back, i think i was escaping all of those well-meaning but empty words of condolence. i wasn't able, at that time, to share dad's death with others.

while i was there, we had a storytelling evening, where well over a hundred people came to have a beer and share their stories about dad. it was that evening that i realized, to an extent, that i did share his death with the whole community and when it really hit me how important he had been to so many people. but i wasn't ready to share it yet then and i'm not even sure that i am now.

just last night, i woke up from a nightmare in which that horrible picture of him with a shirt and tie that didn't match at all was blown up poster size and displayed at the funeral. my dad, who was fired from his sports reporter job for refusing to wear a tie, immortalized with an awful tie on in that awful photograph. it still haunts me, even tho' we were able to get it switched out quickly in reality. i guess i'm having a hard time getting over it, just as it's hard to get over dad's death.

i think of him a lot as we're working in the garden. and i don't go around crying, it's more of an internal conversation with him that i have as i'm weeding or picking asparagus. i know he'd love to see our asparagus, it's finally doing well and there's enough for some for our meal almost every night. he would like that we have asparagus in the garden and i'd love to be able to talk to him about how our sandy soil and the right amount of horse poo seem to be perfect for growing asparagus. i think he'd also be impressed with our rhubarb. it's pretty shockingly prolific. he'd also get a big kick out of the way that our little molly cat loves to "help" out when i'm in the garden. it makes me smile to think of that. it feels like thinking of him in the garden helps the healing.

but i'm just not ready to let go of that toothbrush. so, i'm keeping it for now.

reverting to childhood helplessness

i completed a study recently wherein i talked to a whole lot of foreigners who had, for one reason or another, made denmark their home. some came for love, some for work, some to be safe from war-torn homelands. their feelings of displacement and discomfort were remarkably similar, despite a diversity of reasons for being here. i could easily go on and on about it, but this weekend i found myself thinking about one aspect that many of them cited...that of how being in a new place where you don't speak the language and don't understand the culture makes you feel about 6 years old again.

i was fortunate to have husband when i came to denmark, so my exposure to the bewildering new set of sounds that is danish and the general coldness of the culture was cushioned a bit. but i do recall that with many things...paperwork, phone calls, directions (let's just say that the streets in denmark are not laid out in a nice neat grid like they are on the prairies of my homeland) to get places...husband helped me by taking care of things i didn't understand.

and on saturday, when a heavy maglight flashlight fell on his toe and caused it serious harm which necessitated that he sit in the chair with his foot up, trying to stop the bleeding, for most of the day, i realized that i felt rendered incapacitated myself by his injury. not because i had also hurt my toe, but because it felt like i couldn't do any of the things i had planned to do (turning our front glassed-in entryway into a makeshift greenhouse), because husband wasn't there helping me. he hadn't paved the way. the heavy pots were still out back and some of them had old, dead lemon trees in them. the plants were still sitting out back, being whipped by the wind. but he had prepared a wheelbarrow of soil, compost and perfectly aged cow poo for me the day before, so that was ready. but it took me most of the day to realize that i was perfectly capable of getting on with the task myself.

and it hit me that my reliance on him when i came to denmark, for even the simplest tasks (telling the difference between the kinds of milk at the grocery store, for example), had set the tone. i have, in many ways, stayed that child i reverted to, expecting husband to fix everything for me. and i had lost the sense of frustration that it had early on. it was probably because he took on those responsibilities so kindly and patiently, that we just slipped into our roles and stayed there. he is the eternal fixer and i am the one for whom he fixes.

but, i realized that i was perfectly capable of dumping out the old lemon trees and moving those big crocks around to the front of the house in the other wheelbarrow. and so i did it. and i filled them with stones in the bottom for drainage and that soil he had prepared and i planted tomatoes, aubergine and cucumber. and i arranged it all in the glassed-in entryway, so it can be my makeshift greenhouse this year (we're moving the real one, again, again). and almost immediately it smelled moist and fragrant and green out there. and i had a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of being capable. and the plants have perked up considerably since i took these photos immediately after i was finished, so even they're happy.

maybe it's time to let go of that 6-year-old girl again and start getting something done.

weeding as a metaphor for life

tuscan kale and blue viking wellies

i haven't been weeding enough in the garden. i blame that i wasn't sure which bits were weeds and which were the actual plants i had planted. and with all of the rain lately, it's gotten a bit out of hand. on the bright side, it's a bit easier to tell the plants that should be there from the ones that shouldn't (the ones that shouldn't are WAY ahead). so we spent some time weeding late this afternoon.

there's some kind of strange peace in weeding. you can immediately see the results of your work. there is a sense of progress (as long as you don't look up or look around when your garden is as large as ours). it feels wholesome. and there's simply no way around it, you just have to do it. one weed at a time.

if i'd been able to stop talking to husband while i was weeding (i could feel that he wished i'd shut up, but still i talked), it would have been quite meditative. i'm going to try that kind of meditation in the near future. productive meditation. getting something done while meditating, that can only be good.

i found it very peaceful. and there's plenty to do tomorrow.

i've vowed that i'll spend at least an hour weeding every day. it could be that weeding in my garden will weed some of the other unwanted things from my life in general. like procrastination. and lack of focus. because when you're weeding, you have to focus - you focus on what needs to be there and what doesn't.

it might very well be that weeding is a metaphor for life.