Once we were safely back in Monrovia after our adventures in rain forests and on thunderous oceans, I spent an entire day lying on the enormous bed in mom’s guestroom. With the air conditioner set on a comfortable 26 degrees Celsius and me smelling faintly of lavender soap, not sweat and mosquito repellent and old sunscreen and mud. It is hard to shake off sometimes, that cold Nordic blood. I ate mango and pineapple, read “The Underground Girls of Kabul” and sewed. I needed to mend my silk traveling sheets, you see. The seam had ripped when I was at the farm in Sonoma last summer, but I hadn’t gotten around to fixing it and now I really needed to. I was expecting to need the sheets’ soft and cool shelter to sleep in the coming couple of weeks.
Because, that is maybe the one advice that I would like to give to any person about to embark on their first trip to a faraway place: Get som good travel sheets. We’ve been through a lot together, my sheets and I. Bolivian rain forests, Canadian horse ranches, couches all over the North American west coast and Europe, hotel room s in rural Burkina Faso where you, for sanity’s sake, shouldn’t look too closely into the corners or under the bed. I don’t sleep easily in strange places, but with the deep blue silk sheets that my aunt Eva gave me before my South America trip in 2009, I can create a feeling of familiarity wherever I am. I know it’s a mental thing, the magic that I’ve assigned to the sheets, but so is often the ability to sleep for me. I love my travel sheets. I’ve sung their praise before, I know. But they deserve all the love and care I can give them. Hence, spending most of a Saturday fixing a tear, meticulously stitching by hand.
Outside the window, the clouds threatened rain, but it never came.
Katja Malmborg 