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.