Finishing date: September 2024. Photographed by Katja Malmborg in October 2024.
Cecilia has such a beautiful garden. All manner of flowers, colorful. I started to stay in their guest room when visiting Stockholm during my years in Bergen. One morning I was enjoying a cup of coffee while Isak was prepping Selma for pre-school. The sun was shining at an angle and it was early spring, no leaves or flowers yet, but that made the view from the kitchen window even more layered: first the branches of the plum tree, the apple trees beyond, the lawn, and then the slope of the mossy bedrock, with shrubs and ferns, the old oak as a frame. I commented on it, and Isak said: It’s all Cecilia. Which does not surprise me. She’s created such a pleasant, well-tended to small piece of culture and wilderness on the edge of Bagarmossen.
So, when I had the idea of knitting matching jumpers for their whole family (overly-ambitious projects make me feel so alive – it’s a problem…), I decided to design a yoke-pattern with flowers, to celebrate Cecilia’s green thumb. Same pattern with different, but matching colors for the whole family, made in soft alpaca wool.
But, yeah. Me: overly-ambitious, and never able to commit to just one project. Finishing things can take a while. I completed the jumpers in steps, and then realized: Maybe the kids will outgrow the jumpers before (i) I am done with all of them, and (ii) I manage to gather the whole family, on a day with good light, with everyone in a photography-friendly mood? I might as well take some photos as soon as a piece is done, just to make sure some documentation exists
Which resulted in: A sunny afternoon in October 2024, I photographed Cecilia and Selma among the autumn leaves in their garden. Isak and Nic also joined – but not yet as stylishly dressed as the girls. Natalia was there too, helping out with making the leaves dance for the laughing children.
Written later, on that sunny October day in 2024:
It is so much about time.
Making it rain leaves over a laughing one-and-a-half-year-old.
I helped her mother and father prune the trees that the leaves fell from, back when they had just moved into the house-and-garden, long before she was born. Back in the time of social distancing, their home like a beacon in the murky pool that was self-isolation-and-thesis-finishing.
Her mother and I have laughingly observed her godmother, now helping with the leaf-pile-creation, climb trees for more than half of our lives.
Some ties only settle with lives lived in parallel, quietly, interwoven, in blistered feet, dirt under your nails, pancake traditions, and foliage in your hair.
And the delighted laughter of a new human being.
Life, in ebbs and flows. It is about the people you have to take you through the tides.
Katja Malmborg 