Yearly Archive: 2021

27
Jun
2021

GOTLAND, PART THE THIRD: IN WHICH ROCKS PLAY TOO MUCH A PART

Our last day on Gotland, we decided to head south. When we were there years ago, we stayed in a camping village just south of Visby that includes Villa Villekulla, the original house set from the Pippi Longstocking films done in the 60s. It also had a water park and amusement rides and was a great place to stay with small kids, but that was as far south as we got. Anders and I drove about 1.5 hours, south along the coast, to our destination: Hoburgen, another rauk area in the nature and bird reserve of the southern tip of...

26
Jun
2021

GOTLAND, PART THE SECOND: HEADING NORTH

On Tuesday morning, we ate breakfast outside the door of our cottage, and then headed north of Visby to Lummelunda. It’s a nature reserve that is most famous for the Lummelunda cave, one of the longest caves in Sweden (at 4.5 km). Then entrance to the cave, a natural cavern carved out of the limestone by water, was known for centuries; Carl Linneaus visited it in 1741 and the entrance is named after him. No one got very far into the cave, despite attempts in the mid-1920s, as the passage leading in was too narrow, in one place only as...

25
Jun
2021

GOTLAND, PART THE FIRST: VISBY

It’s been a very long time since we went on vacation, just the two of us. For our 25th anniversary, because Anders had to work that week, we planned a week away for midsummer week instead, and due to the pandemic, we stayed fairly close to home, heading up to Gotland, the large island off the east coast of Sweden. We’ve been there before, when the kids were young, with my mom, but I remember almost nothing from that trip. I must have spent most of it wrangling kids. Gotland isn’t super big; it takes about 3.5 hours to drive...

06
Jun
2021

SORRY NOT SORRY

Don’t apologize. You don’t have to say you’re sorry for not writing. Don’t think people are checking in every day to see if you’ve bothered to write (and thereby entertain them). No one is waiting on the sidelines for your words, your thoughts, your random scribblings. You just write when the muse strikes. When the timing and the motivation line up and the stars align as well. When Mercury isn’t in retrograde (Mercury’s always in retrograde) (Don’t worry about stupid Mercury, it has no bearing on this). It’s not an assignment. There’s no deadline. There are so many moments when...

06
Jun
2021

FOUR-LEAF CLOVERS*

As long as I can remember, I’ve been blessed with best friends. Before we moved to Europe, and I started 7th grade, my memory is hazy regarding friends. I suspect I mostly played with my brother and sister (when we weren’t fighting). Though I do remember riding bikes with a girl named Judy when we lived in Nebraska, I don’t remember what she looked like or anything else about her. The year before we moved to Belgium, we lived for a year in Montgomery, Alabama and my sister was best friends with Jackie, another girl that lived in the same...

28
May
2021

LITTLE GOOD THINGS

I keep feeling like the accumulation of stress, worry, and bad news is going to bury me, and yet, I keep getting up in the morning: to work, to walk, to eat, to read. I keep going, despite the blows that come mentally, emotionally, physically. It makes me wonder where my breaking point is. What if I don’t have one? That’s an interesting thought. Sometimes I get teary-eyed and bust out crying from the stress of it all, and sometimes I just go sit outside on the deck, in the sunshine and I lean my head back and close my...

23
May
2021

YOU HAD TO BE THERE

We watched the entire Eurovision 2021 final last night and in the last half of it, during the voting, the four of us were texting madly in a group chat. Martin, in Detroit, wasn’t able to watch it as he, my mom, and my sister, were in the midst of taking boxes and furniture to my mom’s storage unit an hour away. So he was very engaged in us keeping him up-to-date in real-time on how the voting was going. Karin was watching it at a friend’s place. The following conversation took place AFTER the final results were announced (much...

22
May
2021

SHOTS, SHOOTS & SONGS

Yesterday, Anders saw on the news that hospitalizations of patients with COVID, who have received their first vaccination shot (here in Sweden, at least), were on the rise. Maybe no one told them that 1) it takes 3 weeks for the first shot to reach full effectiveness and 2) it takes TWO SHOTS (for most of us) and a couple more weeks after that to be fully covered. I get that people are increasingly willing to take risks because they are so tired of the restrictions of the past year and a half, but HOLD OUT. Anders got his first...

16
May
2021

NO ESCAPE FROM REALITY

It’s forecast to rain all day and this coming week but the sun has been doing its best to stay out and I went for a walk around the village, enjoying the sunshine (had to remove my jacket!) and the greenery. The cherry trees and magnolias and spirea are blooming. The magnolias, especially the bright pink ones, are such ridiculously pretty pink popsicles of trees. Columbine and forget-me-nots and pansies are everywhere and every field looks carpet-bombed by bright yellow dandelions. Out in the fields, the rapeseed is reaching its neon-yellow heights. And I saw a pied wagtail! The first...

13
May
2021

MOMENT WITH A MAGPIE

Yesterday, we had lunch out on the deck, in the sunshine. Karin was here for a quick lunch for 30 minutes. It was lovely. Later in the afternoon, after I was done working, Anders and I sat out in the sun for awhile again. I had my book and the sun umbrella up and I just sat and enjoyed the green of our yard, our hedge, the trees, the newly planted seedlings in the vegetable garden, the pansies in their pots. I had filled up the birdbath earlier, and while I was sitting there, I saw a magpie alight on...

May 2024
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