Gay/Socialist: the people's choice!

It’s been called a watershed moment in the US history. And it happened this Monday. Seattle’s first out gay Mayor and it’s first socialist were sworn in to office. To me, I must say the latter is more surprising.

In my photo show Away is Home Home is Away, which I produced on commission for The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle 2002, there is a pair of pictures called Love.

One of them is from my Swedish village, picturing the hands of my beloved neighbors Alida and Värner at that time 85 and 92 years old. The other one two tall and fit macho men in tanks, one of them black the other white, holding hands, looking at each other. I caught them from behind at a red light on Broadway. It’s a street shot and they are not aware of me. To me the Seattle gay community is a signum for the city.

Mayor Ed Murray took the oath from former governor Gary Locke (the first Asian governor on the US mainland) on a Gaelic bible held by his husband. Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant’s oath was administered by Washington State Labor Council Vice President Nicole Grant, after which both women turned to the audience raising clenched fists.

I must say, I have never seen a raised clenched fist in Seattle. Perhaps I need a new set of photos juxtaposed, one fist in Umeå and the other one in Seattle.

The event was moved from more or less closed chambers to the City Hall, which was packed with about 1000 people. Reporting happened in national and international news outlets including CNN, Fox News, The Guardian of London, The New York Times, The Times of India and Al-Jazeera International.

Seattle is a liberal American city, no doubt about it. Certainly all my friends are. A couple of years ago I had a meeting with a friend of an acquaintance who was a Republican. I had never even met a Republican before. Driving there I felt like I was meeting with someone from a different planet. It turned out he was a nice person, and we didn’t discuss politics.

I would say my friends are not only liberal, but very liberal indeed. They are opinionated and on top of the political debate not only in Seattle, but national and international. We have never discussed the subject but I doubt that anyone of them would call themselves a socialist though. That’s why I am amazed I have to say, to find a raised clenched fist in the City Council.

Kshama Sawant is known for her uncompromising stands and idealism. She is a former Seattle community college economics instructor, and in her remarks at the ceremony she denounced the “glittering fortunes of the super wealthy” in the city, saying they came at the expense of working people, the poor and unemployed whose lives, she said, “grow more difficult by the day.”

Ed Murray is the architect of the state’s marriage-equality law, which made same-sex marriages legal in December 2012, and one of the country’s longest-serving gay politicians. Murray and Sawant come from different places, but I am thinking those places might be befriending. And this far they agree on a very specific subject: the raise of the minimum wages.

The minimum wage in US is 7.25 dollars per hour. State of Washington has the highest minimum wage in the country, 9.19 dollar by 2013. Now, Kshama Sawant is set on making 2014 the year of the minimum wage 15 dollars in Seattle. Ed Murray chose to make a $15 minimum wage for city employees the topic of his first official press conference. And the pledge by both Murray and Sawant to propose a $15 minimum-wage ordinance to the City Council by April has fueled national interest.

The buzz around the Monday inauguration seems to be an extension of Seattle’s progressive reputation around the country. Washington State already was in the national spotlight for its recent legalization of gay marriage and marijuana. Seattle also was the third city in the country to adopt a paid-sick-leave ordinance that primarily benefits low-wage workers. Since then, three more cities including Portland and New York City have followed suit, putting Seattle at the forefront of liberal initiatives.

Growing up in the Umeå area in the sixties and seventies a raised clenched fist has been more natural to me than same sex marriages. Although Sweden was the seventh country in the world making same sex marriage legal, it didn’t happen until 2009. Umeå has been voted Gay City of the Year twice, but I wouldn’t say gay is a major signum for the city as I feel it is for Seattle; hey, Seattle recently sailed past San Francisco as the most gay city in the US! I would say though that Red Umeå, an epithet from the sixties, still has an accurate ring to it.

Anyhow. Anyway. I am wishing Ed Murray and Kashma Sawant good luck serving the people and City of Seattle, and I am looking forward to what will come out of it! 

The entertainer

-       Will you be going to the family fika tomorrow?

-       If I can get a ride I absolutely will.

-       Would you consider riding with me?

-       I most certainly would!

It is Bertil, calling me the other day. Bertil will be 93 in March and he is my mother’s cousin. He lives on the original family homestead down across the field from me, in a yellow house with a well-kept baker’s cottage and barn.

Every year during the Holidays the family on my mother’s side gets together for a major fika. It is saffron bread and Christmas cookies of many different kinds, and of course coffee, tea, Christmas candy and fruit. This year it was at my sister’s place, and that’s where I needed a ride.

The rain changed to snow just as Bertil was picking me up. I should of course have given him a ride, not the other way around, but things are what they are. The road is slushy, Bertil is an excellent driver though and his eyesight is still unrestricted.

Bertil is a widower since six years back. He was married to the beautiful Kristel who escaped the Nazis through the Berlin sewer system, fleeing her country with her two young daughters. One of the little girls didn’t make it, and Kristel arrived in Sweden with the great loss of a husband, a child and a country. That’s when she met Bertil.

Loosing Kristel has been very hard on Bertil. Yet, it is like he has entered a new phase in life.

I love Bertil, he is very dear to me. He is an intellectual, intelligent, sharp, witty, warm, caring, elegant and an extraordinary storyteller. Being with Bertil is a lot like meeting my father again. They are very similar although not related. I know my mother was very fond of and close to her cousin Bertil, and maybe she saw something in my dad reminding her about her dear cousin. And the funny thing is; my mother and Kristel had similarities too. They were both independent strong women with a lot of character.

In his old age Bertil has become an entertainer. His qualities as a storyteller is widely known, and quite often he is combining that talent with playing the piano, sometimes even singing. In his profession Bertil was an elementary school teacher and church organist, he is still practicing the piano every day. At passed 90 he has refined his teaching skills into his stories, and his fingers are flying the piano keyboard in the most elegant way still.

You could put Bertil into any radio or television broadcast. On stage he is taking everybody in the room in, seeing everyone, giving each and everyone a special word, a nod, a message. His stories are timed on the second and he never runs too long. He knows exactly what he is doing.

One day Bertil told me: ”Maria, I don’t know if I will ever get over the fact that Kristel is gone and won’t be coming back.” I said: “of course you won’t, how could you? She is the one you chose, and she chose you, you had a long and good life together which of course you miss incredibly. Why are you asking from yourself to get over her? That’s just too much to require from yourself, don’t do it!

Bertil is often sad, wondering by himself in his childhood home, most everyone from his early years and adult life gone. He keeps is brain and mind alert with following the news and debates in the world, he watches concerts and theater from Germany on his satellite TV and finds different versions of his favorite music on Youtube. I am sending him a rose by email on his birthday when I can’t walk across the snowy field to give him tulips in March.

And most every week he takes the seat in his white Mercedes which has 187 000 miles, running like it’s still new, and enters a stage where an attentive audience is all eyes and ears for him. He switches his charm on, his gaze young as a boy, his voice expressive and humorous. The entertainer.

Yesterday we were 19 people around the Christmas fika table at my sisters. Three generations, Bertil the oldest, my sons’ cousin Kasper the youngest, just over 20. Bertil isn’t aware of that he is the center for all of us; we are all in love with this wonderful man who can tell the stories of where we all come from.

There is a family tree, and at Christmas Eve the young cousins were gathered around it. Now Kasper started asking Bertil about how it all was connected, who was his father Oscar and how was he related to the young cousins great grandfather Carl? And how come the homestead was divided into two? And tell us the story about their sister Lina who immigrated to America?

The normal duration for a Christmas fika was well passed when we finally rose up from the table. Something very special happened around that table. Three generations together around the family story. No one playing with their phones for other reason than recording Bertil and what he had to tell us. Everyone focused on the same thing. On ourselves in a perspective that we all were very aware of will be gone when Bertil no longer can tell the stories.

To end the day we were all summoned for a summer event we cherish: Bertil’s waffle party in his barn, which he has made into an inn! I know his garden will be at it’s best, him driving the riding mower the day before, making the lawn look like a golf course. And he will play the organ he built in the barn and of course he will tell the stories we ask for. The entertainer.

And beyond 2014?

I sometimes wonder if there will be a 2015. For close to a decade now the focus here in Umeå has been set on 2014. First it was a fantasy, then a vision, then an application, then The Win, and after that years of planning for taking on the incredible and challenging assignment being The European Capital of Culture 2014.

It is incredible indeed. Every year, within the European Union, cities are carefully chosen to be the Capital of Culture. To start with it was one city (1985, Athens) 1999-2000, at the Millennium there were multiple cities, and after that mostly two a year. Sweden has carried the title once before, Stockholm 1998. 2014 Sweden was on the schedule for the second time, in pair with Latvia. And in competition with three bigger cities in Sweden, teeny-weeny Umeå way up north in our skinny country grabbed the title!

I once heard Fredrik Lindegren, artistic director of the year, bending his head, covering his face in his hands, saying: I wish it was 2016.

I can easily understand that. Putting together a cultural year by rank, all Europe watching, would make anyone sweat. Then organizing it.

The title has affected Umeå in major ways even though it hasn’t yet started. I think we are experiencing something along the lines of what happens in a place which is getting ready for The Olympics: gosh, this is going to be a big party, we have invited a ton of guests and we need to make room for them (nice rooms!) clean everything up and make our city a show case!

A bit like when you are having a party at your house; you suddenly have a deadline to change the towels in the bathroom and maybe you get to finally hanging that painting that’s been sitting on the floor leaning against the wall for months. And yeah, a new bulb over the front porch so they can find their way in!

The front porch in Umeå is what used to be the downtown port at the Umeå River many decades ago. Since then, it’s basically been a big parking lot. Not anymore though. The new building for cultural arts, Väven, has been under construction for a couple of years now. The Norwegian firm Snöhetta (the Alexandria Library, the Oslo opera house) is the architect and the exterior (the lower part of the building will be for the arts, the tall part a hotel) glass plates inspired by the black and white graphics of the birch stem. http://kulturvaven.se/#/start/trailer

Big changes always cause concerns among people, and this building creates a lot of change. First, it’s the building itself. Some perceive it as big and loud and out of proportion compared to the city center. It changes the skyline (we still have a very modest skyline though). Then it’s the content. The city library is going to move in to the building and this is making people very emotional. Its’ current location is optimal to many, and why change a winning team?

Cultural arts are also theater, dance, photo, music, film and crossovers from most anything you can think of, now spread all over town. Will they afford the rent in this new flashy city front porch?

During this fall it turned out that the City’s budget for the building only will cover the costs for running the place, there will be no money over for the different art scenes in the facility. This might sound like an incomprehensible problem to an American. But you see, in Sweden cultural arts are to some degree sponsored by the government, and we are relying on that subsidy for our operation. For example, my choir Kammarkören Sångkraft (Sångkraft Chamber Choir) is sponsored with 100 000 Skr (today about 15 000 dollars) a year by the City of Umeå. No strings attached. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.

So, there is no wonder people are concerned about the future of the culture in the European Capital of Culture 2014. Also, the City has failed spectacularly when it comes to digging up private sponsors for the year, which leaves the question: what will happen 2015? Without a doubt 2014 has to deliver, so will there be any money at all left for the different art scenes in the future? And that’s how we are entering this big year of events. This New Year.

Hey, will there be a 2015 whatsoever? I feel a lot like I did before the Millennium. It was such an event. Nobody talked about an after in other terms than all the computers would be crashing and it might even be the end of the world for all that we knew. I was in Seattle (people over here were concerned; if something bad would happen, wouldn’t it be safer for me entering the Millennium here in the woods than in a big American city?) since I imagined that would be really cool.

Well, what happened? Some guy with explosives in his car was caught at the Canadian border heading south, and the big celebration at Seattle Center was cancelled for security reasons. Roomer had it that there was no money left after The Battle in Seattle. At 00.00 I was standing at a roof in Wallingford with family and friends watching a pretty lame fire works at the Space Needle, ousted by Bill Gates’ at the Gates residence on the other side of lake Washington. I would say it was an anti climax, and then the world continued with no fuzz.

2014. In only two days. Umeå European Capital of Culture. Will it be an anti climax? And will time go on beyond that like nothing happened? Will there be a 2015?

Josephine

Her plan for this afternoon was to cut a tree in my grove. But it’s poring down outside and I wonder if she got it done.

Her name is Josephine. She is the grand daughter of my beloved neighbor Alida, 96 years old. Josephine moved back here this fall with her little baby girl.

Her dream, since she was a little girl herself, was to have a horse. To have a horse you need somewhere to keep it. And you need to take care of it. You need to be mature and responsible. Josephine is 22 years old and she takes care of two horses, a baby daughter, her grandmother and me.

Alida has been here for me all my life. For my sons all their life. For my mother all her life. And for my grandmother a big part of her life. Alida remembers and tells stories of great-grandmothers and grandfathers. And she is playing with her great-granddaughter. Alida is carrying every generation within her. She is a dear friend and the one I go to for grounding myself, and when she for some reason is not at home I feel like my back bone is gone.

Josephine tells me she always wanted to be a young mother, and she is. She feels her home is here in the woods and so she moved back here when her baby turned one. She is taking a break from school and is working for Civil Care, the home care company that takes care of Alida and me.

Her horses are Daisy and Grevinnan (The Countess). Daisy is young, only two years old, and Grevinnan ten, a bit more mature. Their winter home is an enclosed pasture basically on her front yard and my backyard. I can see them next to my Big Barn when looking to the north. They are so beautiful! I have never been a horse person and never been close to horses, but I love having Josephine’s horses as neighbors.

Josephine is the one now fixing my breakfasts. It’s such a treat! She comes here every morning, cheery and always in a good mood. We share our every day stories, big and small, high and low. I love it, and I know she enjoys it too. Sometimes her baby girl comes with her, and I love the idea that she is now getting familiar with my house the way I got familiar with Alida’s house when I was a baby.

I so admire Josephine. I have seen her with her grandmother since she was a teenager, always warm and caring. And now I see her with her daughter, such a natural mother. She doesn’t have a manual and yet she does everything right instinctively. I didn’t. You would think it’s in your genes how to take care of your children, but it isn’t. It’s trial and error. Some seems to be equipped with the right tools from the start though, and Josephine is one of them. Her baby girl is very fortunate.

Boy, it’s raining. I am not a big fan of snow, but for Christmas I would like some. Now it actually looks like we will have a Seattle Christmas, wet and foggy. I am thinking about last year when our Seattle-Becca was here for two weeks over the Holidays. Did she pick the right year for visiting her Swedish brothers and family! 5° F (-15°C) 3 feet of snow (90 cm) and clear skies. My place in the woods was an out of this world Christmas card and brought Becca a Holiday memory she will forever cherish. I am glad we don’t have any foreign guests this year; Sweden isn’t delivering!

Gosh. I am crashing on my coach. My choir Kammarkören Sångkraft (Sångkraft Chamber Choir) did just close the season with our traditional Christmas concert. Three full houses. As my back keeps being difficult I had no clue if I could do the concerts. Through this fall I have only been able to attend like every other rehearsal. My plan was set for two of the concerts, the one yesterday and the second today.

At the end of the one yesterday I had to be lead out by my friend and alto colleague Agneta. Today I was in such bad shape I was thinking it had to be the worst decision this year heading off to Umeå stads kyrka (the Umeå City Church) to stand up singing for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Yet I did it. And yes I did it! I did the whole concert and was even able to be present and enjoy welcoming the Holiday together with my friends in the choir and an attentive audience. I am so happy and grateful.

Trouble & Trouble cut our tree some days ago and it’s all dressed and very beautiful. We will spend Christmas here together with my sister’s family, all together 13 people. Not since 2007 there has been a real big Christmas Eve celebration here at the end of the road, and I am so happy about it.

And at my neighbors Alida and Josephine will celebrate Christmas with their family. I feel safe knowing they are there. Knowing that our families will continue being interlaced with each other. Alida has been such a safety in my life, a warm and solid point. I am hoping that I can be Josephine’s. The woman in the house next door. The one who is always there.

Ship ahoy!

Oh how I loved being in Seattle during the Holiday Season! Just loved it!!

The Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Westlake Mall! The lit up Downtown, crazy with Christmas shoppers! The ferries filled with dressed up people going to Christmas parties! The neighborhoods competing about the most insane over-the-top light displays! But most of all I love the Christmas Ships!

For many years I made sure getting my dosage of Seattle Holidays. I packed my bags in December with an assignment of a story for Swedish National Radio or Television as an excuse and headed over for a week-ten days in a rainy city making the lights even more vibrant in the reflecting puddles.

I shot Seattle Men’s Chorus in Beneroya Hall and the Dreamliner Virtual Rollout, I reported about the different ingredients of the American Holidays and about The Washington Software Alliance. I told the story of the Cool House, the new city public library and I interviewed the author Russel Banks on a Seattle December visit. I also spent days sitting at the Blackbird Bakery on Bainbridge Island working on the texts for my photo show Away is Home, Home is Away. A couple of times the visit was postponed to right after Christmas, making me spend New Years in the Emerald City!

The Holiday memory I treasure the most though is the year we stayed in Seattle. Cause there can’t be any better place for a Holiday experience than Portage Bay overlooking the Montlake Cut!

Our place for the year was a small house that didn’t look like much from the outside, but was such a wonderful little home for my family. It was on Boyer Avenue about five blocks from University Bridge, and Portage Bay was the best entertainment all year round. I used to have my afternoon tea lying in my cushy cream colored love seat watching whatever was going on down on the bay through my big panorama window. I never got tired of that view! All those boats in different shapes and sizes! Trouble & Trouble and I had our different Argosy cruise ships favorites. Come to think of it, Trouble 2 and I actually agreed on the same preference.

This weekend is the opening for the Christmas Ships in Seattle. And I know exactly what Portage Bay looks like this evening! A parade of lit up, dressed up, spruced up boats glittering and glimmering in the dark night! And some of them have music, choirs singing on the black water!

Trouble 2 and I could sit for hours watching the floating lights waiting for our ship. Here it comes, there it is! Let’s just sit here forever and enjoy this! Oh how I miss that! And where did that little boy go?

Actually, he and Audrey are down in my kitchen making dinner for us. He is right here. In the woods at the end of the road. The opposite to Portage bay. No water for ships to sail on. I am doing what I can to lit up the dark though. Strings of lights in my maples guarding my gate. Light curtains from the roof of my front porch. Spotlights shooting up my dad’s ash tree down in the corner and the big pine next to the field.

There is one ship though! My grandfather’s old apple tree is lit up with spotlights and along the round wooden deck underneath sits a string of lights. Another string is attached to the rope tied around the stem at the crown of the tree and anchored in the ground some feet away in the lawn. That device actually looks like a backstay and in the summer I even connect a light piece of fabric to it, which makes you think of a sail.

It’s been snowing today. In the snow there is a lit up apple tree that in wintertime looks like a space ship. No, I don’t have any waters. And there are no ships sailing here. I might be able to arrange some singing though. On my space ship in the woods at the end of the road.

Italian like a delicate pencil drawing

A little more than half way through now!

I took German in school for six years. Spanish for one, we didn’t get along. But I’ve always been attracted to French. Like we would be a cute match.

Language studies were my thing in school. It came easy to me. I don’t think I have ever been more devoted to my studies than when I trained for being an assistant nurse. This came as a surprise to me as I wasn’t really on for the profession. But I figured out why. Learning every bone and organ in the body in Latin was nothing less than language studies and I just couldn’t help myself being bent over my books late all night!

Winter 2002 was a hard one. I was working on a documentary project for the European Broadcast Union and it was absolutely killing me. Spring came, I was finally out of it, and I laid my eyes on an ad in a newspaper offering language classes abroad. Studying French in Nice, of course, of course!!

Well, it turned out that taking Italian in Florence was less expensive, and hey, why not?!

I had never even glanced at Italian before, but here I was suddenly, late April in Florence, trying to learn a language I didn’t know a word of in a small group of German, Canadian, Japanese and American students, even a guy from Seattle! Our Italian teachers didn’t know any English, so this mix was quite an adventure.

The class was running extremely fast. The morning hours were every day filled with new grammars, and in the afternoons I was sitting outside the Dome, next to Ponte Vecchio, or at Piazza della Signoria going through my notes, trying to make sense of everything squeezed into my little head.

My roommate was a Japanese girl who didn’t know a word of English. Since my Japanese wasn’t quite there, there was no way for us to communicate what so ever. Although I, of course, kept speaking English anyway, I don’t know why, I could have walked around the apartment speaking Swedish for all that I know! Anyhow, at the end of my two-week stay we could actually communicate in three word sentences in our now common language Italian, and it’s actually hard to express the feeling when that happened. Pure happiness! We had conquered a giant obstacle, and this has to be how children feel when they get through to their parents in words instead of noises and cries!

When I left Italy after two extremely intense weeks, I felt like I had been run over by a jet plane. But I had really grown attracted to Italian. I loved the sounds, the speed, and the passionate way of expressing the most ordinary things.

The years to come, I took some evening classes to learn more. And then I found another ad. “Learn Italian like a child does!”

This was a self-studying course. Perfect! I had been thinking about that for a while. The ad was a little bit funny though. It looked like something from the Fifties. A pencil drawing with a text. But there was a website that looked a bit more promising. I ordered the class and some days later a brown card board box arrived.

In 2008 the Fifties arrived on my desk. The box was packed with stacks of thin yellow booklets. They looked like something I would have found at my bakers cottage attic, left there by my mother’s aunts. I opened them up. They were filled with text (and I mean filled), top to bottom, only once in a while interrupted by tiny delicate pencil drawings, a perfect image for that time and age.

It was interesting though. The text was only in Italian. No translations. And under the text lines phonetic transcriptions. You learn the language by a text where words are repeated in different contexts until you actually get it. There is also a dictionary following the chapters if you get stuck. And a manual, which explains the purpose of each chapter, what you are supposed to learn.

Boy, was this funny! The complete course is 50 chapters divided on 16 booklets. If you are an ambitious student working through one chapter a week you are done with the course in a year and you have a vocabulary of 4000 words. But I tell you, that’s a lot of work! This class is as intense as the one in Florence, although different.

The Fifties design and approach was a concern to me though. I checked with my dear friend Agneta who is an Italian teacher: am I learning a kind of Fifties Italian here? She looked through the first chapters and approved of them, quite impressed by the grammatical ambitions.

So, I took my assignment on! I was aiming for a chapter a week, but then I found a tumor in my breast and made it one chapter per chemo treatment instead. And after the 6^th and last treatment my brain shut down and I was incapable of any kind of studies.

My yellow booklets had a rest for about a year, and then I started all over again, repeating everything from the beginning. Summer 2012 I was back to where I was interrupted and decided on studying five minutes a day. Yeah, that’s not a lot, but I figured that’s something I could actually do.

And I have. Five minutes after writing my journal in the evening. The last thing I do before lights out is filling my brain with Italian words and grammars. That’s my daily brain-workout. At midnight. Some do Wordfeud, some sudoku, some cross words. I am learning Italian.

Now, five minutes a day doesn’t add up to a chapter a week. It’s more like a chapter a month. So it took me a while to get back to my Italian support Agneta for a check up. And when I did it turned out that Italian had changed from the Fifties after all… I am now finding out that I am learning an Italian that is only still spoken on Sicily and in the southern parts of Italy. The most conservative areas of the country. If all.

I am laughing long and hard at this. I find it quite funny. I learned how to play bar chords on my grandmother’s old hard stringed guitar. On that foundation every guitar thereafter was a piece of cake. I am fantasizing my Fifties Italian will work the same way!

Agneta, who besides teaching Italian, French and English also has a head for numbers is telling me five minutes a day makes half a high school course in one year. That’s not bad! And since my late night class actually varies between 7 and 15 minutes, I guess I am in fact doing one full high school course a year!

So, 50 chapters. And I am just now finishing up chapter nr. 26. I do not have a head for numbers, but at the speed of a chapter a month doing the math tells me it will take me 24 more months to finish the course. Two more years before I have a vocabulary of 4000 Italian words. I wonder if I will know how to put them together? Will they still exist? And will I put them together in a way that not even Sicily or the most conservative southern parts of Italy will understand in 2015? Will I come across as a delicate pencil drawing?

Missing Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving and 4^th of July. The two days on the year when I miss Seattle and the US the most.

It might have been 1998, my second Thanksgiving in Seattle. Visiting with my family, living a hotel downtown life. My sons and their dad headed back to Sweden when dad was done with his work, and I stayed for another week or so to get my job for the Swedish National Radio done. This was the regular pattern for our shorter stays during a lot of years.

It was perfect. Family time with family friends added on with time for myself in the big city.

Only. My sons and their dad departing Seattle leaving me behind was the worst. I loved staying at what’s now Homewood Suites at Pike Street. I loved my downtown life. I loved doing my journalist freelance work. I loved the feeling of temporary freedom. But I hated the moment for separation from my family. I knew I would be fine in a day or two, but I just couldn’t bare them leaving me. Yet I chose to go through that, time after time.

So, 1998 (or was it -97?) they kissed me goodbye and headed back to Sweden on Thanksgiving. I was deserted. Downtown deserted. I cried. I cried my eyes out in my Homewood suite. This was my choice and I cried. Knowing that nice people would surround me in just a few hours didn’t help. I cried.

When it was time for it I crawled out of my self-inflicted misery, put some casual nice clothes on and made my face. I drove my rental through a quiet city and in a little while I was welcomed into a warm house by warm people. Close friends, friends, and friend’s friends. It was Thanksgiving.

My inside was still grieving. Knowing that Trouble 1 would be in pain on the long flight, his ears all clogged up. And maybe Trouble 2 was a little bit sad going back home without his mom. I don’t know how I was perceived that evening. Distracted. Uptight. Shy. Rude. Not quite there. Everyone was truly friendly and nice to me though, making me a part of their Thanksgiving spirit, which was still fairly new to me. The table was long and at my turn, saying the thanksgiving, made it a very special evening.

Late that night I drove back to my downtown home. I’ve never seen the usually 24-7 lit up Seattle skyline that dark. Understanding that most everyone at that time was sitting at a table somewhere surrounded by family or friends. And that some had a very lonely evening. You are never as lonely as when you know you are not supposed to be.

This year I am watching my playwright friend Elizabeth posting video clips on Facebook. Act 1 is already in the morning, someone starting preparing the food. The clips and different acts moves through the day at Grandma Betty’s house in the Catholic part of Capitol Hill where about 30 people from different generations are getting together.

Oh how I miss them. Oh how I miss all my Seattle friends on a day like this. I miss how they are loud and warm and crazy and witty and fun and smart and caring and… I miss them so it hurts. They are a part of me.

And I miss the little bit of American life that I once had. And wanted a lot more of. During those years when I was commuting between US and Sweden I often got the question: so where would you prefer living? A tricky one to answer. I remember responding that if I had to sell my place at the end of the road in my village to become a Seattleite, the choice would be very hard.

For many years though, I had the best of both worlds. But I always wished for more of Seattle. And that’s what I also always pictured. I can still hear myself driving my routes across University Bridge, Downtown, Arboretum, down to Lake Washington, Montlake Cut, Wallingford and U Village, saying out loud: someday I am going to live here! For real! Tanning in Gasworks Park, power walking around Greenlake, watching the sun set in the skyline from Kerry Park, strolling among the house boats in Portage Bay feeling it deep down in the core of my body: someday I am going to live here! For real! Just watch me!

In 2007 I took a first step for more Seattle life. Trouble & Trouble were 19 and 21, big boys already, and I felt that the stretches in Seattle could be extended. I bought a car! Yes I did! I would have my own car waiting for me whenever I landed in The Emerald City! And I invested in a storage unit for my Tempur Pedic mattress, my special Seattle clothes and other essential necessities, which until then had been dragged between tolerant friends basements. The storage even had a view of the new light rail! Yayy!

But life had different plans for me. And today I am thinking that I might have to find a way bringing back all my things to Sweden. It is not likely that I will be able to come back to Seattle. Even if I at some point could do the trip, I couldn’t do it by myself and I couldn’t stay by myself. If I am very lucky maybe my sons will go with me and visit if my body can do it. But a life in Seattle, as it once was and even more as I pictured it, longed for and wanted, no, my hopes for that is buried deep down in me.

So, hearing Elizabeth’s voice and laughter on her Thanksgiving morning makes me sad for myself. I know, it’s not a pretty feeling. But I love that laughter and miss it so much! And only hearing the North West Coast American English that happened to become my language is unlocking a piece of myself, (yes, go ahead and laugh my friends, I am aware of my accent and all my quirky slips, it is still one of my languages!). And I want to be in that language! I want to share 4^th of July with 30 000 people at Gasworks Park (yes friends, laugh on, I will still love it!) and I want to be a part of Thanksgiving, I want it to be one of my Holidays.

I have tried introducing the thanksgiving into one of my Swedish holiday traditions. Not the turkey, the stuffing or the pumpkin pie, but the thanksgiving. I am finding the ritual everyone around a holiday table expressing their gratitude one of the truly most beautiful. My efforts, so far, hasn’t been glorious. But maybe I just have to be persistent. Maybe I need to give it a few more years. If Maria won’t come to Thanksgiving, then Thanksgiving must come to Maria.