Jun 24, 2012

Midsummer butterfly

02.52. That’s when the sun did rise here at the 63rd latitude in Sweden this morning. 22.58. That’s when the sun sets tonight. Yesterday at midnight, driving back home from a Midsummer’s Day dinner at friends, the sky was still red from that yellow ball dipping just below the horizon for a quick 3 hour and 25 minutes nap. The windows of the tall buildings at the river waterfront were still glowing. The old hay barns at the plains entering my village are making vague shadows in the middle of the night. It’s crazy. It’s out of this world. It’s weird and torture and orgiastic and panic and magic and sad and jubilant and breathtakingly painful. It’s Midsummer’s. An elusive butterfly.

The soul of the Swede is known to be melancholy. Our traditional music is often slow, set in minor, melodies beautiful as heart ace. The lyrics are all flowery: buttercup, red campion, forget-me-not, lilacs, lupine, peony, wild roses. Set in a scene of white nights and tall shadows. Accompanied by song thrush, chaffinch, lark and blackbird. It’s all about this. It’s all about Midsummer, the elusive butterfly. The all too short life of the light.

We are a people celebrating summer solstice like no one else. Midsummer’s is the reason for living this close to the North Pole. Midsummer’s is the motivations for staying here, dragging ourselves out of bed every morning when the schedule is the opposite; 3 hours and 25 minutes of daylight. This is what we are longing for, waiting for, desiring 11 months and three weeks of the year. Midsummer’s is the beacon we are carrying before us wandering the heavy walk of fall and winter. The Midsummer night is the lighthouse of treasured memories and imaginative future glowing ahead of us in our fantasy about next summer. Next summer, that will be warm and green and peaceful and happy and fun. Next summer, when every winter dreamed dream will come true. We are like little children expecting everything for our birthday. And we all know what can come out of that.

Twice, we have had friends from Seattle visiting at Midsummer’s. 1998, the coldest and rainiest Midsummer in a hundred years Terry, Doug, Reed and Zoey spent this pagan holiday with us. It was like a Seattle winter and two families were stuck inside with a broken dishwasher. Terry swore she would never come back. And she won’t, I’m sure. 2001 was the warmest and sunniest Midsummer in 100 years, and Matt, Elizabeth, Olivia and Rebecca happened to hit that one. Sun screen nr 40, moose outside the bedroom window, my big extended family putting up the real Midsummer show, may pole and everything. Leaving for Paris and London after the weekend Matt commented: “It can only go downhill from here.” Umeå and my village still have a glowing aura when it comes to that family.

And right now I am closing up Midsummer 2012. It has been a good one. I wouldn’t say really warm, but sunny and pleasant. No rain! Family. Friends. Absolutely good enough. But right now, when the sun hides behind a cloud and will take the dip down in the forest in a few minutes, it brings the anxiety on. Because this is the turning point. This is when we start loosing a minute of light every day. The warm weather (if there is any) usually doesn’t start until July, just as the weather isn’t safe in Seattle until after the 4th. But the light is already turning! In a month the dusk will sneak up on us at around 11PM. And we won’t be ready. No no, never ready!

So, this is why the panic. The sadness, the pain. The transparent, translucent, energy-transmitting Midsummer is equal parts euphoria and torture. It’s impossible to grasp and hold on too. We can’t keep awake all around the clock. And yet we are clinging to every second of this. Every scent, image, sound, every moment. But Midsummer’s is a rare butterfly, fleeting, gone way too soon. Elusive. Slipping out of our desiring hands.

Jun 18, 2012

Being Alida

She has been there all my life. And my sons’ lives. My mother’s life and a great part of my grandmother’s life. Her name is Alida, she turned 95 years last week and she is as beautiful as her name.

Alida is my next-door neighbor. When I was a little girl I used to ride my three- wheel bike on the dirt road to Alida, picking up the morning bread for breakfast. I avoided the henhouse, being a bit scared of the jumpy cackling creatures.  Alida and her husband Värner baked crisp flatbread and delicious soft bread in their baker’s cottage for a living. Ah the smell, knocking at the door, being welcomed into the flour dusty room steaming from the hot and glowing stove. And then quickly quickly pedaling back to my mother while the swallows were diving for food, mom spreading butter on the still warm bread, melting in my mouth, hands all wonderfully greasy. It sounds like a fairy tale, and it is.

But the two households were connected long before that. My grandparents and Värner and Alida were good friends even tough they were different generations. Later my mother and father took grandma and grandpa’s place. Countless are the cups of coffee pored at the kitchen tables, innumerable the quick walks between the two houses needing half a cup of salt or en egg, and immeasurable the laughs and tears shared in these homes while life has been lived, passed, and passed away.

For more then 30 years now, I am the one who gets to be Alida’s neighbor and friend. Värner is gone, so are my parents. Alida’s two sons are a bit older then I am, unattainable and admired from a distance when I was a young girl, today my friends. They have given Alida four granddaughters, and two of them are the same age as my sons.

Saturday Alida’s sons threw a birthday party for her, and we were all there. We shared the stories, the laughter and the memories, and we created new ones to bring in to the future. My heart was flooded with joy and love watching my sons and the girls sharing jokes, connecting, securing the continuity between our two families.

The blackbird is singing in the peaceful evening. Deer are grazing next to our houses. A swan couple is floating in the sky over our fields. At midnight the apple trees are glowing white in the midsummer light. It is a fairy tale. Alida is carrying every generation in her delicate body and generous soul. My grandmother, my mother, me and her sons, our young men and women and their children to come. And I am hoping to be the next-door Alida to the generations following in the house next to mine. The woman who has always been there. The one who is always there.

Jun 10, 2012

High expectations and healthy skepticism


Ha, at least that’s a comfort! I am learning that it’s been more rain in Seattle this far this June than the full month a normal June. Ha! Because in Umeå the sun is still cold. Unfortunately June can be a pretty crappy month in both my cities.

So, we have to look beyond the weather to find what’s good. And believe me, there is good stuff! At least that’s the idea. We won’t know until it’s all there. And even at that point we won’t agree on everything. Hopes are high and doubts are deep rooted.

So this is what’s going on: Seattle and Umeå are both working focused on their front porches, the design of the new waterfronts. The visuals from those are very different right now though. The most central part of the Umeå waterfront, right at the feet of the historic Stora hotellet (The Grand Hotel), is a huge busy and loud hole, the preparation for the new building for cultural arts, Kulturväven. In Seattle a new gigantic ferris wheel is changing the familiar water front scene. The Seattle Great Wheel on Pier 57 makes a new frontline and creates a fresh landmark in between green and white ferries and orange port cranes. But this is what’s before our eyes. What’s happening behind the scenes is even more exciting.

This spring has been about processes in both my cities. In Umeå, a group of about 70 has been thinking, discussing and expressing the content of the new cultural arts building, Kulturväven. People from the City, non-profit organizations and representatives from the grass root arts have been engaged in the process of creating a new kind of meeting point, a cultural melting pot not seen in Sweden before.

The creative process in Seattle hasn’t been about one building but the whole waterfront. 2011-12 the project Waterfront for All is focusing on concept design, and the calendar this spring has involved public discussions titled Climate and Context, Mobility and Access, Environment and Ecology, Setting the Stage and Uniquely Seattle. Discussions, which will be important for the final design of the new waterfront.

So, a lot of crucial work for the development of Seattle and Umeå has been accomplished this spring. Umeå has a deadline close enough, being the European Capital of Culture 1014. The time plan for Seattle Waterfront for All is a longer stretch. High expectations and healthy skepticism, that’s how we are awaiting the realization of these big plans, Seattleites and umebor - residents of Umeå. The very same way we are waiting for the summer.

Jun 3, 2012

Cold sun/magic light

-       How is it physically possible that the sun is out 20 hours a day and it doesn’t get warm?

It’s my friend Harold from US visiting Umeå this spring asking. Good question Harold. Very good question. We are sort of wondering ourselves. Although most of us have been here all our lives. I can’t say it’s a mystery, but it sure is an annoying fact.

Panic and hopeful expectations.  That’s the first days of June in Umeå this far. We had to wait a long time for the leaves to come out this spring. April and May were really cold and the birch trees had to hold the greenery until last weekend when everything popped in two days with a temporary warm wind that embraced the city and turned it into a transparent cloud of light green. That’s the way it usually happens, we really should be used to this transformation, know all about it. But no. Stunned, amazed, perplex is what we are as winter finally is loosing it’s grip and let’s us out to breathe, move, play, live! Was this what it was like?! Is this how I can feel?! It’s magic. It’s nothing but magic.

So, why the panic? Well, the southern wind was chased away by it’s polar cousin, and gloves were on again and the only reason to why not a wool hat too, is that it’s June, goddamnit! It’s finally June, the first out of three all too short precious summer months, and every cold windy rainy day that passes steals away a percentage of a potential summer bliss that we just need way too bad! Cause we don’t get a new shot at this until next summer!

-       I mean, I’m waking up every morning and it’s sunny and lovely (in comparison to Seattle where it’s usually hazy) and chilly but that’s okay, and then at lunch I am thinking it’s gonna be warm outside (like in Seattle where the sun has burned off the morning fog) but it’s still cold, and then finishing up at work the sun is still there and I’m expecting it to be hot (in Seattle the temperature is rising all day with a climax in the afternoon rush hour) but it’s still 10°C (50°F), and I just don’t get it!

What can I say. We have a cold sun up here.

But.  There is one thing that’s really reliable here on the 63rd latitude. Polar winds, weather patterns, climate change, recessions, Euro crisis, oil price, terrorism, we are safe. We have the light. It’s not like “Isn’t it unusually dark for being this time of year?”  Or “Wasn’t June a lot lighter last year?” Nop. We have the light. Pretty much 20 hours a day now, and that day is continuing stretching three more weeks. I am not going to get started on how we are reacting passing that moment, that’s a different story. But for now, we have the light. Reliable, consistent, stable unaffected. It's magic. Nothing but magic.