Tagged: wonderfulworld

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,...

Do you know the story of the little engine that could? When you’re reading it out loud to a child, you have to do train sound effects. Steam whistles and huffing and puffing and the chug-chug-chug-chug sound that gets progressively faster as the little engine gets going. I’m doing that chug-chug-chug-chug sound in my head right now…2 weeks is a really long time to go without writing anything, and I feel like I need a push, a pull, a hand up this hill. chug-chug-chug-chug Talking to my brother today, confirming that yes, we had arrived safely home after leaving him...

I always feel slightly guilty about referring to The Netherlands as “Holland” but on this trip I realized that all the postcards I saw said Holland so now I don’t care. It’s the same American-centric weirdness that made me wince as I was answering my daughter’s question about why people from Holland speak something called DUTCH when everyone else’s languages match the names of their countries, or nearly. Holland appeals to my sense of order. It makes the Virgo blood in me sing quietly. The trees in rows, the shining strips of the canals neatly dissecting the country in every...

On a summer evening, when the sky is clear and pure, like glass, like an endless ocean of blue, and the sun is lowering, shining fierce, shining hard, stretching long shadows, sharp shadows, what I want to do is capture the light. I want to share it, show and tell the sun. I want to tell you how driving through these rolling hills, this green big-sky country, this summer, makes me feel. I look hard at everything, I note things down in my mental notepad, I try to polaroid through my eyes. Snap! Snap! The air is crisp, magnifying everything....