Katja Malmborg

re-growth

And there is something calming about getting dirt under your fingernails, too. I re-planted all my plants this weekend. I even went to the second hand store down the street and found three nice little pots to put the new cuttings in.

I know November might not be the best time to change soils for the plants, that they prefer sleeping during winter just like everyone else – but they’ve been looking so sad lately and I thought something new would do all of us some good. It felt good in my hands, covering the roots with new, moist soil.

So now I have a new set of freshly planted plants. Let’s see if they survive the winter. The orchid is shedding its flowers.

a different kind of starvation

The leaves have fallen to the ground now, but until a week ago, we had the most amazing autumn. And maybe it’s from all the staring at spreadsheets, the black and white world of statistics – but it’s like I’m starved for colors. I cannot remember ever being this delighted by the palette of autumn.

And I’ve bought yarn. There was a sale on my favorite alpaca type, I bought some, went back to the store and bought some more, I even ordered some online. I admit, it went out of hand, now I have more than 60 balls of it. Mostly bright colors.

But I’m thinking it’s a good thing. I think maybe, hopefully, the colors will keep me sane throughout the dark Stockholm winter.

evening, 11th

Impulse shopping at the grocery store, feeling drained from the aerobics class and forlorn, abandoned by the spatial patterns that I as a geographer have come to rely on. Today. my maps haven’t shown me anything. Instead, filling my arms with foods without plan – I just want them.

The navel oranges have come. A sure sign of Christmas approaching. I remember in high school, Jim questioning Sandra’s claim that such a thing as a navel orange exists. They do exists. I bought eight.

And the persimmons. My stepmom Anna introduced them to me, and the winter I lived in Uppsala must have been an extremely good year for persimmons, because they seemed to be on sale whatever grocery store I went to. I ate several a day, sitting on my big couch in my airy, borrowed apartment. Today, I bought nine.

Small things to hold on to, when the big ones aren’t making sense.

autumn has come

All the leaves have fallen to the ground now. And as the season dictates, my body is powering down. I want to do simple things, slowly. I think it might be time to start making Christmas candies.

This time last year, I was walking ten kilometers a day in the Sahelian sun, simultaneously conducting walking interviews, photographing and collecting GPS coordinates. No hibernation there. Time has passed so fast.

face-lift

I gave up. I have not been able to come up with a new, smart name for the blog. It’ll stay geographies of belonging.

I am a geographer at heart, after all. And I’m still looking for a place to belong. The search has just turned from spatial and social, to rather more academic.

There is still some more stuff I’ve been thinking I should include in this face-lift of the blog, but I don’t have time to do it all at once. Life as a research assistant is busy. But just so you know. Don’t get surprised if things don’t look like you’re used to.

A morning’s crop of fall, like an archipelago on the sea cold stone.

the jungle of West African statistics

I’m cleaning data. Tracing changes to Ghana’s district divisions, trying to make different datasets match. Data collected by different ministries is not always consistent, district names are spelled differently, districts having been split means data collected at different times needs to be merged. Having several spreadsheets and a GIS open at once on my two screens, just to make sure all edits are done in the same way.

It’s a mountain of work. Hundreds of data points that need to be checked and coded. And for what? Several days of work. And the result: three maps.

Maps of Ghana and Burkina Faso showing information about demographics. At least the colors are pretty.

I’ve come to appreciate like never before the meticulous way in which Swedish statistics are gathered and stored. To produce exactly the same maps for Sweden would have taken an hour, max, instead of three days. Because everything is stored in easily accessible databases, coded according to the same system, be it number of libraries in a municipality or forest cover. Sweden is a wonderful country to do research in.

I am not, though. So tomorrow, I’m going back to the laborious work of data cleaning.

late, as always

I was walking down the stairs from my office the other day, the center was quiet, the sun was shining outside, and it suddenly hit me.

I have a master’s degree.

I don’t think it has fully sunk in. That first week in June, with thesis deadline, graduation party, presentation and then me diving straight into this new project, flying back down to Burkina Faso to meet my new colleagues.

I didn’t have time to let the pieces fall into their new places. I still feel like a lost, confused student, trying to grasp all that knowledge that most of the time seems to be just out of reach.

But really, that’s not who I am anymore. I have a master’s degree. I’ve got a diploma as proof of my expertise. It’s just that I’ve chosen to continue on the path of knowledge creation, which makes me feel like I know nothing. Because it is true. I know nothing. But neither does anybody else, not with regards to the specific topic that we are studying. That’s what research is. But what I have are some of the tools necessary to create new knowledge. That’s what those five plus years at uni were for.

Imagine. I graduated when summer had barely started. It took for the leaves to live their whole lives, and then fall in their last blast of fiery glory, before I caught on.

*

I walked down to the lake. The sun was almost painful in the water, the smells of leaves on the ground intoxicating.

I sat down on a cliff, read some in the book with Annika Norlin lyrics. She always manages to creep up on me. I think I know my favorite songs, the most potent of her phrases – and then something new jumps out at me.

I can’t tell right from wrong now
but I saw the sharpest curve on your upper lip
Oh, tell me if it’s true what I heard
That it was brought here by sparrows
Flown over fields and angels approved it
For they landed on you

Maybe it’s the places where I’m at that make the words speak to me.

I’ve had a phrase ringing in my head the last couple of days, I fell in love in fall. I might have to write a short story.

And, yet again, thank Annika.

ride my heart

I walked down to the lake, the sun was shining through yellow leaves. I came upon the meadow where horses were eating, and I was struck by a resemblance. For a moment, I thought the brown pony that was eating by the fence was Ofelia.

Ofelia was the first creature in this world, outside of my family, that I really, truly loved. She was a young brown pony, nothing special really. I got to take care of her for two years in my mid-teens. And the depths of the feelings that I had for that horse, it shook me for years after I was forced to give her up.

The resemblance was only there for a moment, though. Just a step closer, and I realized this pony was too small. And, anyway, Ofelia would have been old by now, almost twenty, she might not even be alive anymore.

Bittersweet, how memories come to us sometimes.

how long does it take

I like listening to the radio. These days, they talk a lot about the “refugee crisis”. I don’t know how to deal, so I carry on with my life. I see photographs of crying children, and I start crying too. And then I pick up my smartphone and play a game of Tetris. The disconnect in modern society is unfathomable.

The politicians are talking about numbers and money and laws and structures, but then there are the people. And they come from places. Circumstances I can’t even imagine. In one of the programs, a woman said something that stuck to me. A question that I’ve been carrying around.

How long does it take for war to leave a body?

To be honest, I think I’m still feeling the swells. And in my case, it was my Finnish grandparents who survived a war.

We cannot understand. And that this autumn has been the most beautiful that we’ve had in years makes everything seem even more surreal. The sublime and the miserable not contradictions, but facts of existence.