When overwhelmed with big ideas and new people, it can be nice to cling to the small things. Like a coincidence: At the summer school, I met a German PhD student who is studying different ways in which the concept ‘multifunctional landscapes’ has been studied. Already that is interesting to a certain degree, since the paper I wrote based on my master’s project together with my supervisors, which is still in review by the way (!!), claims to show that the landscape in northern Burkina Faso is multifunctional. But. That is not the point here. This PhD student and I turned out to have a stronger, but much more surprising connection.
See, I recognized her vaguely. And there was also something about her surname. It took me a couple of days to put my finger on how, but suddenly the pieces fell into place. I asked her if she had a sister who was a teacher? Yes. Who had spent time in Canada? Yes. Wwoofing at a horse ranch outside of Vancouver? Yes. With a woman who filled her house with cats and dogs and wwoofers? Yes.
As it turns out, I wwoofed together with her older sister for a month in 2012 outside of Vancouver. She, the PhD student, even came to visit her sister there and I remember spending a morning talking about horsemanship with her while cleaning the stables. And now we were here, in a tiny village in the southern French Alps, participating in the same PhD course. We live in such a small world! She only seemed mildly amused by the coincidence, but me it kept going for the rest of that day.
That afternoon, while standing outside the lecture hall gazing at the magnificence of the valley, I thought about other connections. Like, I was drinking lime blossom tea for the first time in my life, and eating a cupcake not entirely unlike a Madeleine. In France. Like Proust’s main character – the flavors that open him up to his childhood and youth in the blink of an eye. That segment of text, as an example of how to use the sense of taste and smell to open up a story, so often used in the creative writing workshops that I participated in as a teenager. Standing here, drinking lime blossom tea and Madeleine-like cupcakes thinking about my teenage years of writing prose.
Again. Funny, how being in a strange place seems to connect me to my past.
Katja Malmborg 