Author: lizardek

If you sit really still and listen, in addition to not causing the canoe to wobble violently, you’ll hear the water life under and around you. That stretching sound is your muscles, pulling and contracting in ways you’d forgotten. That slapping splash and arpeggio of water drops is the paddle dipping in, pushing and displacing, your body the motor that moves the boat forward. Fronds wave slowly and wetly beneath you, you pass so quickly over them, their elongated strands leafily undulating, wetly waving. An army of dragonflies darts madly about, a zipping sound, capering and dancing above the green...

All those crappy crap days are worth it when Sweden pulls out all the stops like she did today. I think of Sweden as a ‘she’ probably because her name is Svea, at least that’s what I call her (she calls me Lis, or sometimes Elisabet, whistling the s between her teeth. Swedes always seem to soften z sounds, it’s so cute). How does a people decide whether the land that birthed and nurtured them is a motherland or a fatherland? Or is it just different for each individual? Or for each sex? I never really thought about this before,...