Life, with the garden
Location: Skarpnäck, Stockholm, Sweden • • • Visit: Summer 2014
A while back, I read “Maphead” by Ken Jennings. Oh, it was an amazing book, really, funny and informative and endearing. All about maps and other geography related stuff that, you know, melts me like butter in the sun.
I don’t remember when I’ve last started crying as many times when reading a book – but in this case, not because it was sad, but because of how touched I felt from recognizing myself in all the nerdy geography buffs and mapheads Jennings described.
This just proves it. I AM a geographer. It wasn’t just coincidence that I started studying it back in 2009. I think spatially, in systems, I am visual in my way of understanding the world. And places matter. Jennings describes the concept of topophilia, which is from the Greek for “love of place”, and describes the strong sense of place that some people have, an intense connection to landscape. Jennings continues:
“Young topophiles are most deeply shaped by the environments where they first became aware they had an environment: they imprint, like barnyard fowl. Baby ducks will follow the first moving object they see in the first few hours after they hatch. If it’s their mother, great; if it’s not, they become the ducklings you see following pigs or tractors around the farm on hilarious Sunday-morning news pieces. /…/ Falling in love with places is just like falling in love with people: it can happen more than once, but never quite like your first time.”
For me, those places are widely spread, a legacy left in me from my vagabond parents. It’s Skarpnäck, obviously, and Södermalm, which are the two neighborhoods in Stockholm where I spent most of my time before the age of seven. The Stockholm archipelago, where my family rented a small cottage on a tiny island without electricity and running water. The southern Finnish rural landscape, with small fields, lakes, forest patches and tiny villages – the sun going down behind the spruce forest beyond the wheat field that lay at the foot of the hill of my grandmother’s house. The red earth and hot, dry smells of southeastern Africa, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania. The turquoise waters of Greek islands.
I’ve seen many other places after that, landscapes that are more beautiful, dramatic, fascinating. And I wouldn’t be able to say which ones I like the most. I just like landscapes. But with Stockholm, Uusimaa in Finland, Tanzania, Greece, it is different. Those are places that I feel a bond to, in a way that goes beyond liking.
Jennings ends one of the book’s chapters with a quote by Simone Weil. It says:
”To be rooted is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Night company:
There’s a butterfly hanging (out), upside down, in my bedroom ceiling. It’s been there since I came home from work, sitting completely still.
I wonder what it’s waiting for.
When I woke up this morning, the butterfly was still there, sitting on the ceiling.
But when I came home, after work, it wasn’t. It had moved to the wall next to a window. Perfect place to catch it from.
It fluttered in the glass, probably tired and exhausted little thing, but I managed to get a picture before I released it into the warm, sunny July evening. A small tortoiseshell butterfly, it was. It flew, high up above the buildings, toward the milky blue summer sky.
Or, better yet, a well-tended, lush villa garden in Enskede.
I move slowly tonight. Watching the skin on my hand wrinkle when I move my fingers. The feel of having joints.
It is a warm night outside, I took a walk and the air against my bare legs was gentle and sweet. There are so many layers of me here, in Skarpnäck. These red brick buildings and trees. The traffic lights at the three-way junction ticking out of sync, telling me not to cross. The street completely empty, as it is most of the time. The smell of the white roses. The cherries are black and ripe now, but no one picks them. I should buy a ladder. Or make friends with someone really tall.
I’m almost done with the crocheted pillowcase now. But I’m running out of yarn. I think I’ll go into town tomorrow to buy some more.
First day of my summer holiday. I went into town and bought yarn for 300 kronor. Then Natalia and I went to do aerobics at Skarpnäck’s sports field. Jumping around to Destiny’s Child in the July evening sunshine is damn close to perfection.
On the way home, I started telling Natalia about the cherries that are going to waste by my house, and one thing led to another and suddenly we were both standing on the roof of a bicycle shed, picking big, black cherries into old yogurt buckets. The six-year-old twins that live in my building helped us by running around on the ground, yelling instructions to us about where the biggest cherries were. Deep purple cherry juice all over their faces.
“but you are what you love – and not what loves you back”
I wish it would rain. Hard. I so like the sound of the drops on the tin roof.
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.
By on some cliffs by Lake Mälaren, with Ashley, Dries, and others: friends helping each other to not get skin cancer. 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 lake 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.
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: Embroidering “because Katja said so” on a pillowcase. The name of the handicraft brand that Jessica thought I should start. I’m making the pillowcase for her, per her request, as a late birthday gift.
And now I’m 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.
Katja Malmborg 