notes from 2018

73

States of emergency, since March, today restrictions were tightened even further. My mind wanders off in associations, one crisis makes me think of another.

In the notebook from 2018: “Hot summer, dry, an extreme high-pressure system stuck, looming over our parched Nordic soils. I find it tough. July, walking through the groves, seeing trees start to drop their leaves. Hearing news about the largest forest fires in Swedish recorded history, crops failing, animals sent to slaughter due to lack of fodder. That smell of dry grass, parched soils. It is subtle, easily missed. Like a light tickle. Among the savannah acacias and baobabs, that smell is lovely. In the early morning sun, like a poem. In Stockholm, the same smell makes me want to cry. It is wrong. It aches and itches in its subtlety.

Helplessness, thinking of my friend Jonas, poet, saying: ‘We need to explore what it means to live, act, feel, be in the age of humans’. But how do you do that without drowning?”

And some days later: “At the cottage. The smell of lingering dust, memories of mornings in the desert. No rain for six weeks. Reading “Grief is the thing with feathers” by Max Porter. It is short, so simple – and carries the heaviest on its shoulders. Death, sudden, to be left behind. It is a feeling in me and the words bring it out, so carefully that I barely notice. It is beautiful, the book. And funny. In the difficult moments, the perspective of a crow might be just what is needed. Thinking: The grief felt over yellow edges on birches in early August. I need a crow for that, too.

Later, sitting on grandma’s old bench, sketching flowers. The sky darkening behind the quivering aspen leaves, contrasting in shades of purple with the gray-green trunks. Wind, gathering speed in the crowns of the hill-top oaks. A drop, a flash, rumbles in the distance, and the sky opens. After, the stillness. Air heavy with earth, sweet. After-drops falling from leaf to leaf, like sighing. A rainbow behind the hazel hedge.”

I don’t need to write my feelings today. My feelings from that summer of fire and dust translate into this dark, sun-less November day. The crisis might be different, but the sentiment. Same.

Photos: (1) Rose after rain in the International Rose Test Garden in Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2012. (2) Yellow lime tree canopy in July, Bergianska Trädgården in Stockholm, 2018. (3) Gathering storm clouds over the aspen trees in Hundby, Gnesta, Sweden, August 2018. (4) Cottage desk still life, August 2018.. Posted on Instagram November 16, 2020.