Month: August 2012

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Sweden

I am in sixth grade, wearing a white eyelet dress with braids pinned in loops. The get-up is finished with a wreath in my hair. With candles. I carry a tray of cardamom-laced rolls in the shape of an “S” to country report day. Fourteen years later, I am in Dala-Järna, Sweden, a town so small that when we put its address into the GPS, the arrow dives straight into a forest. A little girl with blue eyes shiny as marbles scampers around her great-grandmother’s cottage where I notice a photo of her…

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Blackbird Cathedral

We clicked “buy flight” less than a day before take-off this past Saturday, and that was it. We were going to a state we'd never been, the heartland. And when we arrived it was just that. We walked outside into 100 degrees of heat and 180 degrees of flat and it was silent. No people. No moving cars. Just an occasional bird scratching the air with noise. The sky was so empty and high I couldn’t find it. It was a place you sense you’ve been before. You know planner me----I research trips months a…

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In thanks

The sky above Manhattan was all the swirls of sherbet tonight. Now, just light on building tops, and shadows below. Two weeks ago we rode through fields in Sweden. I have a swell of posts in the works, but for now am thinking of gratefulness, how thankful I am for you who stop by to hold my words, too. To my aunt and uncle in Maine who check every day. Thank you. To friends I have met along the way that still pop in to say hello. I wish it could be in person. Know that on dark, damp summer nigh…

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Great Danes!

Something of the ritual of sitting here in a small New York apartment and summarizing a country is invigorating. To have seen, to have traveled and moved over such great quantities of land---was thrilling, is a great gift. A year has passed since our plane left Europe and my willing-the-wheels-to-somehow-stick didn't work. The wheels stuck this time, and it was cool and blusters. We sat at the sidewalk cafe for breakfast that first bleary morning, and I wrapped myself in the blankets provided on…