One of the new inventions that the right-wing coalition implemented after they first got into power in 2006, was to introduce a tax reduction on something called “household-related services”. I won’t get into detail about it, but basically it’s now way cheaper to redo your kitchen or hire a cleaner than it used to be. Now, everyone (I mean, anyone who can afford to) is redoing everything in their homes! But, the political situation in Sweden is not stable at present. Chances are that the left-wing coalition will win the elections in September (FINGERS CROSSED!), which means that taxes might be increased. Thus, the tax reduction on all this home improvement stuff might not be around for much longer. Gosh! thought mother. Best to take advantage of the situation. Let’s redo the bathroom!

In my mom’s defense, a renovation is kind of needed. Nothing has been done about the bathroom since its construction in 1984, and there’s something weird about the design that causes the water to flow away from the drain, not towards it, from the bath tub.  The drain is also a very cheap, badly functioning construction where dirty water gets stuck and sometimes it starts smelling. So, a renovation isn’t completely unnecessary. However, going to the home improvement store was not really what I expected to spend my vacation days doing.

There was so much stuff! So many different taps, toilet seats, sinks, bathtubs, showers. So many different colored tiles! They even have these cupboard-sized saunas now, that can be installed in a corner of a large bathroom. Imagine that!

Really, it was quite an interesting experience. And it’s decided now. It will happen. I will not have a functioning bathroom for three weeks about when I’ve planned to start working on my thesis. I guess I’ll spend all my days at university then, anyway. There are plenty of toilets there, after all.

When Hannes was here the other day, we spoke about Burkina Faso. Because, have I told you, I’m going to Burkina Faso for ten weeks in mid-October to do field work for my master’s thesis. Hannes was there last summer doing field work for his bachelor’s, and talking to him about public transport and the political situation and speaking French, something released in me. I started feeling excited.

I started talking to a doctoral candidate and a researcher at the SRC in the beginning of the year about joining their project on landscapes, ecosystem services and livelihoods in the Sahel to possibly do some remote sensing/GIS stuff, and in March or so we agreed that I would use satellite images to try to scale up the ecosystem service mapping that the doctoral candidate (the admirable Hanna) has done on a couple of villages in central-northern Burkina Faso. Of course, groundtruthing is required on site to check if my satellite image classification has been successful.

In May, my scholarship application got accepted, which means I have the funds to go, together with my classmate Elli. In June, I bought the plane tickets, set to leave in mid-October, doing field work until mid-December, and then I will go to Liberia to spend Christmas with my mom, possibly going through Ghana for some sightseeing.

But all through this, I have not felt any excitement. It has all been an endless list of must-do’s. When most of the planning got settled, in April, I was so busy with my double course load and everything else that was going on, so I only had time to make sure everything got done. No excitement. And then the pressure kind of held on, all through May and then into the traineeship and living arrangements and mom coming and what if the classification method that I’ve chosen doesn’t work and I don’t speak French for fuck’s sake! How the hell am I going to survive? (To be honest, I do understand quite a lot. I did study French for six years, after all, and I took a French course in the spring and have been tuning up my vocabulary with flashcards all summer – but, you know. Whenever there’s a slightest reason to worry…)

But now, after having talked with Hannes about his field work experience in Burkina Faso, things don’t seem so much like chores anymore. I went to aerobics at the Skarpnäck sports field, and while jumping around there to Miley Cyrus, I started thinking about how I should test out my groundtruthing method and where, and before I knew it, I had worked myself up into one of those idea flows that I get sometimes, I was sweating and doing sit-ups and singing along and coming up with method testing procedures in Stockholm and solutions for the potential lack of reception from enough GPS satellites in the Sahel.

I’m going to Burkina Faso in two and a half month. I’m so excited!

 

A Landsat image of parts of the study area in Burkina Faso. This is my raw data. This is what I will earn my master’s degree on. Pretty, isn’t it?

Mom brought me back an apron with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on it from Liberia. The Nobel Peace Prize winning president. I now have four aprons. My collection of grandmother accessories just keeps on growing.

It feels weird, having mom around all the time. It feels very safe, but at the same time. It’s like I’m not my own person yet. I’m still a child and I behave like a teenager.

I kind of think I won’t really feel grown up and independent until I move out of mom’s apartment. And, that won’t happen for another year. I almost feel younger now than I felt when I was 21 and traveling around Bolivia on my own.

I went to an exhibition at Fotografiska, the photography museum in Stockholm, yesterday with Hannes and Ashley. Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis, which is a huge collection of black-and-white photographs from all around the world, all showing remote places, pure wilderness. Untouched by modern man. The Arctic and Antarctic, the rain forest, the savanna and the desert. Incredible landscapes. And the message is: these places exist. And they should be protected. Salgado has said that this is his love letter to the planet.

My favorite photo was one from the south pole. Chinstrap penguins in the South Sandwich Islands.

That freedom. The utter improbability of it all. The kind of wonder that it instills in me. That is the feeling I would like to be able to capture when I write, that’s my goal. The improbable wonder of living. Like a flying penguin.

The exhibition was heavy on the eyes. Afterwards, we walked along the water through central Stockholm, ending up in Kungsträdgården. It was a beautiful day, storm, photographs, company and all.

There was a storm yesterday. Brutal. The kind that could blur your edges into something unrecognizable, like ink on a paper. I couldn’t stay put.

I ran out in the yard, with Jonatan right behind me, and we started running around in circles on the grass. It was like being in the shower. The drops heavy, thunder raging like I’ve never heard it in Stockholm before. The yard was soon an immense puddle, perfect for jumping in, barefoot, every single piece of thread soaked on my body. The rainwater downpipes turned into waterfalls, the pressure in them so high that the water flew in all directions.

And the smell during. The wet soil and the electricity in the air. And the smell after, the softness of the air, the release. Like a breath of fresh air after a very long dive.

I love rain. Especially if it’s summer. I love being out in the rain. I love jumping around barefoot and getting soaked and feeling the drops on my face.

Hannes, who was visiting, isn’t a crazy Ruohomäki family member and didn’t therefore follow us out into the storm, but he stood in the gazebo and laughed. Mom brought out the camera. We must have looked like two escaped mental patients. An amusing sight, indeed.

I didn’t get anything that I kind of should have done, like finishing my traineeship report or my thesis workplan, done today. But still, it was a really agreeable day. Seriously. I haven’t had such an agreeable day in a very long time. It must have been the heat and the sun and all the open windows, the breeze, that blew any kind of ambition out of my head. Instead, I cleared half of my desk. Watched Luther and Gilmore Girls and fine-tuned my newly discovered embroidery skills. (I will write about it one of these days, Gilmore Girls. There’s more there, behind the shallow silliness of the show, that makes me feel safe and go back to it, time and time again. There is a thought forming about it in me, but it’s not done yet, the thought, so I’ll just wait until it is.)

And I walked around in the breezy apartment. I don’t know if it was the influence of the heat on my thought patterns or that I haven’t had this much free time for ages, but I started to see things differently. Details in this home. It’s mom’s apartment. Almost every single guest that comes here comments on how nice/cozy/homely the apartment is, and I always answer that my mom has good taste. Because that’s what I’ve been thinking. Me and Lina are living in mom’s apartment, with her furniture and her art. But, while walking around in the breeziness and light, I realized they’re there. The signs. We have left our mark on this place too, Lina and I. Small things that can say something about the people who live here, for anyone who has the presence to look for it. Traces of a life lived. The details that make a home.

My attempts at croquis covering the bathroom door, the broken balloon rubber still tied to the door handle since October, when Hannes put it there.

The little chest of drawers that I saved  when I was helping dad to clear grandpa’s house in November. And the dried and gilded branches that were part of aunt Kaarina’s birthday bouquet to mom for mom’s 60th in December, that I saved from the rotting tulips and ferns. They’ve been in a vase in that forgotten corner next to the bathroom ever since. I chose the warm yellow color in the hallway when uncle Kalle tore down the kitchen wall years ago.

Stuff on the kitchen counter. The Tinga Tinga tray that dad bought in Tanzania and gave to grandpa, and I then saved when the house was cleared in November. The bowl that I bought for mom when dad and I were on Sifnos in Greece, in, what, 2001? The mechanic scale that I bought when I had just moved to Uppsala, and that I used to weigh all the apples that I stole from the villa gardens at night.

Mom’s morning coffee left on the kitchen table. The single candlestick that Hanna gave me for Christmas sometime in our teens. The ribbon, that originally was attached to a bottle of wine that Vivi brought for one of all the dinner parties that I’ve hosted during the past year. Lina’s penis cactus at the far end.

Above the stove. Before Christmas, I crocheted so many potholders while learning about regime shifts and resilience assessments in class.

The book shelf in the kitchen. The metal Masai statues bought at Slipway in Dar es Salaam in 2000, the bus has been part of mom’s home decorations ever since I was a kid and she brought it home from one of her work trips to Zimbabwe. The photo a Christmas gift to mom, taken by me during the field trip we did to Namibia in 2010.

Hanging from a hook in the hallway ceiling. The dried roses a birthday gift from Kirke, I can’t even remember how many years ago now. I don’t like getting flowers. I can’t justify the long transportation required to get them here, when their only function is to look pretty. However, Kirke often buys me flowers anyway. The balloons are still left from the party in October. I’m planning an October party volume two, to celebrate the balloons’ one-year-anniversary. Also, I’m leaving for West Africa in October, so I guess it’ll be a goodbye party as well. Possibly Christmas-themed. I’m already looking forward to doing all the Christmas baking in October.

My door. The Little Prince postcard was a gift from Lina when she went to Paris with her mom last spring.

My bookshelves, this summer almost completely hidden behind Jessica’s stuff that I allowed her to store here. On Monday, Dries will come to drop off his stuff here too. I’ve become a regular storage facility for Belgian students in Stockholm.

The doors of my cabinet. During a period in my teens, I spent a lot of time in cafés, and there I developed an interest in collecting free postcards, the kind that actually are advertisements. This is where some of them ended up, together with some old photos of friends and family as well as some of the analogue photos that I took and developed in the lab in photo class the last year of high school.

My bulletin board, full of mementos from all over the world. Mr. P. The mask I bought in Venice when I was there with dad and Hanna in 2003. The front of the box of Swedish Fish that I bought when I went to that Slovakian movie at the Seattle Film Festival together with Miles and his girlfriend. The brochure for the Carl Larsson exhibition that I went to last fall as the second date with the guy who later that evening grabbed my ass and ever since is known as the ass-grabber among my friends. I did not go on a third date with him – not really because of the ass-grabbing, but. School just forced me to drop everything that wasn’t essential. The note where I wrote down the name of the nerve that refuses to agree with me sometimes, paralyzing half of my face: trigeminus. The medical student that I was seeing in the fall of 2008 looked it up for me. He didn’t stick around to teach me the names of any more nerves, but I kept the note. It’s already happened three times, complete face paralysis, statistically I would say that the risk of me getting the face paralysis again is significant. I might just as well know the correct name of my tormentor.

My bedroom window, as seen from the outside. My mint and my basil, Lina’s chili and the spider plant that I’ve been trying to kill for more than a year.

Funny, how re-discovering your home can turn into such an adventure.

Then Frida and Marita came, we went for a swim and then made dinner together. A quite unmemorable, utterly perfect day.

The heat is compact. I have no problem with temperatures, I’m fine with anything between minus thirty to plus forty degrees. However, the more than thirty that we have now is making things go slower – as if the faster moving molecules in the air are increasing the friction, making it harder to move.

I wanted to write. When having one of those blood-loss-conversations with Ashley two days ago, I said I wanted something to be excited about. Something separate from the worry and the anguish. And it hit me: a short story. That could get me on my feet again. Writing prose always gave me purpose, and until just a couple of years ago, I used to write at least a couple of short stories per summer. I was also thinking: I need to find my way back to Swedish. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having a very passionate love affair with English. I will not abandon it. But. There is a clumsiness, and the insecurity from not having been born with it. I know I make mistakes. There is a detail in Swedish that I just can’t accomplish in English. That is fine for texts like these, but when it comes to prose, the kind of prose that I want to write, there is no room for clumsiness.

So I’m going to write a short story in Swedish. Alternatively, a couple of those prose texts that I used to write a lot of in high school. I biked into Södermalm yesterday in the heat to get started.

On Greta Garbo’s square, in the shade of the trees, on a green bench facing the small elephants, many good things have come to me. I discovered it after having finished “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” back in 2003, sitting on the stairs of the library by Medborgarplatsen. The heart-break when Sirius Black died was still heavy in my body, but there was a lightness to me too, the sun was shining and I was walking at random through the streets, headed south-east toward my aunt’s for dinner and suddenly I was just standing there, in Greta Garbo’s square, with the trees and the flowerbed in the middle and the grayish pink elephants and a song came to me. “I wish (a cappella)” from Robyn’s first album. The complete song, every single word – and I hadn’t even listened to it that much. It wasn’t a song that I had acknowledged. But it had been hiding in a corner of my brain and came out here, on Greta Garbo’s square, and it all felt like magic. Like an other-worldly experience.

Ever since, Greta Garbo’s square has held a special meaning to me. I go there, to read and write sometimes, when I need calm and inspiration. But yesterday, nothing came. I wrote in my diary, and I read Nicole Krauss’ “Great house”, but I couldn’t come up with a single story-line, a single situation that I could make a reflection on. The words were there, but they got stuck somewhere in between my head and my hand. I biked home again, with an empty notebook and a hint of frustration in my shoulders.

It’s just as hot today. I’ve been home all day, with all windows in the apartment wide open. Curtains are blowing in the breeze. I still don’t know what to write. So I started doing something else instead:

The name of the handicraft brand that Jessica thought I should start. I’m now making her a pillowcase, per her request, as a late birthday gift. It needed a little embroidered detail. First the practice version at the top, and below what is going to end up on Jessica’s pillow.

And now I’m all excited about embroidering. I’m overflowing with ideas – pillowcases and cloth bags and aprons and purses. I have tens of meters of Liberian fabrics. No one I know will be safe! (Of course, I won’t write because Katja said so on everything. That would be a little bit too self-indulgent, I think, even for me. It’s just a thing, an insider joke between me and Jessica. – – Also, I’m counting on that she doesn’t read this. I want this housewife touch to her gift to be a surprise. She’s been in Belgium all summer, and no one from Belgium has visited this page, according to the statistics that WordPress so generously provides me with. So. I think I haven’t made a huge blunder by publishing this.)

Anyway. I found something to be excited about. I’ll still work on the writing, though. Maybe tomorrow. There is a slight chance of rain then, according to the weather report.

I’ve had conversations. The bloody kind, me baring my neck for anyone to bite. But the people I’ve had the conversations with have been the good kind. They’ve said: “You have to be humble also with yourself, Katja. Some feelings you can’t help, they will just come and you’re left to deal with them. You have to be kind to yourself, Katja.”

And I think I am starting to feel better. I’ve been biking a lot. To lakes, with bikini and a towel in my basket. There’s been a lot of swimming. Today:

Friends helping each other to not get skin cancer. With Ashley, Dries, Emma and Emma’s friends at Gröndal, by Mälaren. Possibly the warmest and sunniest day of summer.

Biking home through the southern suburbs with Dries, not really getting lost, and arriving home just in time to leave again for Flaten together with cousin Jonatan. At the lake, we ran into mom.

The sun was golden and the water was so soft. Warmer than in Mälaren, I almost swam across the lake and now the tiredness is in my bones, as well as behind my eyes.

The good people. And family, from encounters yesterday and today. It’s so easy to forget the linkages and the effect one has on others. The good people who know me now, and don’t shy away from what they see. And the people that have known me always, can tell stories from Crete twenty years ago, people who remember the person I’ve been. Life witnesses, as mom calls them. The connection they create for me to past selves, and to something bigger. Family. Unconditionality.

I think I’m starting to get better now.

This is the 1000th entry I make on this blog.

I’ve gotten a pimple in my right eyebrow. It annoys me. I woke up at five this morning, noticed it was there, and then I couldn’t fall back to sleep. Not because of the pimple, of course, but let’s just say it was. It would be so nice if my sleeplessness could be explained by the life cycle of my quite rarely occurring pimples.

But I’ve finished the pillowcase at least. Now I’ve started another one.

Yesterday, we put the ashes of my grandfather in the ground.

Two-year-old Kai saying goodbye to his great-grandfather.

After some soil dropping and a song, we had lunch together. The family, gathered for this hot summer’s day, four generations Smith family descendants, from as far as Kenya and South Africa.

Life, circles, and all that. It was a nice day.