The other day I beat my husband home from work by only a few minutes. I had just sat down on the couch when he came in. It’s cold again here in Sweden after several weeks of rather warm for winter temps and rain. We had a dusting of snow last night and I’ve plugged the car heater in each evening for making sure I could start it in the mornings.
When he walked into the living room I tipped my head back and said, “Hey there.” He responded by putting his hand on my forehead. It was ice cold. “Aaaah,” I said. He put the other one on my head, too. “That feels great,” I remarked, “But why are your hands so freezing cold??”
“Because my heart is so warm,” he said.
At dinner the next night, which happened to be at my sister-in-law’s home, to celebrate the 16th birthday of her son, I repeated this story for my mother-in-law and then had to repeat it for everyone else while Anders put his head in his hands, all embarrassed. I leaned over and told him, “I am so blogging this, you know.”
After I related the story again for my father-in-law, who is hard of hearing and had missed most of it the first time around, he said, with a perfectly straight face, “But the heart maintains a steady temperature of 37 degrees celsius” and couldn’t understand why we all burst into laughter again.
I leaned over again to Anders: “TOTALLY blogging that, too.”
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16 years in Sweden. Plus the 6 in Belgium and Germany as a teenager, that makes 22 years abroad. In only 2 years, I’ll have lived half my life overseas. I find it more remarkable every year, but really, what’s remarkable about it? It’s just my life and my home and how it is.
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I have 3 big projects to work on right now, plus feeling like I should really do some work for WORK, at which there is too much to do to keep up with during work hours. I still have to finish the Lego Project (bwahahaha! Who am I kidding with that optimistic “finish”?), and I pulled out the big folder of photos I have crammed into the bookshelf to start sorting through. And I just PDF’d my 2012 journal entries so I can start formatting my next book. What? There’s always SOMETHING to do!
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We’re going to see Fanny & Alexander tonight at Malmö Stadsteater. It’s one of my favorite movies, and I love the story, so I’m looking forward to it, though the kids are much less enthusiastic about the prospect. I had asked for tickets for Christmas but didn’t realize that Anders would buy 4 for the whole family. Oh well, chalk it up to cultural experience and hope they get something out of it for character growth, right?