tavie.com

Okay then. I'm in the computer lab at school, having just bought my textbook, and have finally retrieved my Country Logs from the disk I stole from Linn. I've decided to publish them here anyway. Whatever. But I STILL won't eat one ear of your filthy corn!

Friday
Substitute blog without internet. I’m not good at blogging without the instant release into the net-void. I think having it sit on a disk stewing will cause it to ferment, like Swedish herring, which I hear is very popular this time of year amongst old folks with rotten tastebuds.

But there are so many experiences at the country house here in Sm?land that I’m afraid to lose if I don’t try to capture some of them. So I’ll just do the recording like the good little addict that I am and hope that the words don’t rot without the life-giving cyberliquid to oxygenate them. I’m typing on Linn’s laptop-sans-modem. It’s very cute, a Compaq from the 80’s.

It’s Friday now. We got here on Tuesday night, me and Linn and Emma, and I collapsed immediately into bed. The last leg of the bus journey made me feel drugged, a combination, I think, of the Dramamine I’d taken three hours earlier, the jetlag and the few hours a sleep I’d been getting a night. I think they woke me for dinner and that I ate, but I don’t remember the details, except that Dr Phil was on tv. (They LOVE Dr Phil here.) Then I collapsed again.

Wednesday we went down to the family pier and tried to lure the sunshine out by waggling our variously-undressed limbs seductively in the direction of the clouds. This is when I truly began to come out of my drugged feeling and sense the poetry of this place. (Last year, my refrain: I’m IN the poems!)

The combination of nature and the Tom Robbins I’ve been reading, plus a healthy pinch of my overly romantic nature, had me seeing everything around me in awkwardly-constructed metaphors. Thus, when I lowered my toes into the bay, it was “two pale city feet bobbling in the green water like slices of banana suspended in lime jello” (seriously, I thought that very sentence, and I feel no shame, for the terrible simile was like fishfood in the dank aquarium of my heart). My feet were also “chunks of white cod, dancing in the cookpot”. Then I was in a fairy tale: “The troll maiden lounged at the water’s edge, dangling her heavy feet in the enchanted waters. Two fair elves lolled nearby, but she was unstung by their smooth beauty, feeling her rumpled body to contain a magic of its own in this Elf-wood.”

Despite the on-and-off of the sun, Emma and I were both determined to have a swim, our last (and my only!) chance to swim for the summer. But every time I felt ready to take the plunge, the clouds would return. Finally I untied my hair (to cover my body in the bathing suit more than anything—this troll wasn’t COMPLETELY unselfconscious yet, even in Elfland) whipped off my shirt and launched myself into the water. Cold. COLD. But, then, warm. And lovely. I started out towards the wooden raft, and eventually Emma worked up the nerve to follow (brava to her—she’s one of those zero-body-fat typed who feel the cold more than I do) and, to our surprise, Linn grew jealous and jumped in as well. The swim was incredibly energizing, and then exhausting, but our exertion kept our damp selves warm for the walk home. This is all alien activity to me, so rarely do I indulge in any form of exercise more taxing than a climb up a subway staircase.

Every night we’ve eaten the vegetables Linn’s mom grows in her garden. (You remember her sprite-pixie-brownie of a mom, yes? Sparkly as ever!) Every morning I breakfast on fruit and Swedish yogurt. Linn actually went out and picked blueberries for our yogurt the other day. And every evening I sup on the heavenly nectar, sent down from Mount Olympus itself, in the form of the greek yogurt-cucumber-garlic concoction that I fell in love with last summer. (Faerie-mom remembered my intense fondness for the dish and made a huge bowl for me, which was waiting here at the house when we arrived.)

I admit, I’m back on coffee. But not an unreasonable amount. I think I’ll be able to jump back on the wagon when I go home.

Yesterday, Linn and I tramped through the woods and saw the house where her mother used to live, and saw an eagle flying over the lake, and tramped some more and picked lingonberries. She was right: after a day of picking lingonberries you dream of picking lingonberries. And I found a four-leaf clover.

Let me say that again: I found a four-leaf clover. I have been searching for one my entire life. You've done it too. I flopped down on the vast lawn to wait for Linn to be ready to go berry-picking, and my eyes lazily roamed the clover, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I found a four-leaf clover?”, like one always thinks, and scarcely had I thought the question when my eyes alit upon one. It’s pressing between the pages of The Blind Assassin as I type. I’m not overly superstitious, but I go through certain motions “just in case”- I wish on stars nightly, I say “rabbit rabbit” at the beginning of each month, more likely OCD-symptoms than superstitious actions—but, really. Finding a four-leafed clover in the most magical place in the world (save Epcot), this is too much for me. I must allow myself to take it as an omen, as long as I’m here seeing elves in the treetops and singing songs to berries… (I was Sleeping Beauty yesterday.)

Today it was rainy, and Emma departed for a DJ extravaganza in Stockholm. Oscar is supposed to come tonight, and I eagerly anticipate the chap’s arrival. I don’t feel at all third-wheelish, good indication that he is a male goil (some say “boil”). Linn and I have just made lingonberry jam. Yes: lingonberry jam from berries we picked ourselves. It is currently cooling in jars on the counter. If you can think of a better rainy-day-on-the-Swedish-countryside activity, I’d love to know what it is.

I guess that’s enough for the blithering now. I’ve captured the experiences sufficiently. I’ve even left out the complaints (do I really want to remember that my new sneakers don’t fit, and wore a blister into my heel, or that I’m here too late for the daisies?) So I’ll go have some more experiences and get back to you, blog. Chew on this for awhile—don’t let it stagnate until it reaches cyberspace. Thanks.

(P.S. I’ve lost weight and I feel pretty again, at least temporarily… Remember. Remember. Don’t let it go this time. What would Dr Phil say?)

Saturday
Linn and I biked to the lake yesterday. I made it up most of the hills but I had to walk the bike up some of them. I got to ride “Grandma’s old bike”, a tri-coloured, brown-leather-saddled affair that, if you could see it, you’d agree it’s exactly the kind of bike Tavie should ride. Linn showed me the crayfish pools, which were still and milky and presumably contained crayfish somewhere within. She showed me the cute little local restaurant, and we rode the see-saw and clucked at the chickens. On the ride back, Linn’s eyes grew huge and greedy for the blackberries she spotted just behind an electric fence. So great was her eagerness to reach the thorny treats that she bumped her shoulder into the fence, emitting an lightning-bolt yelp that I’m sure startled the cows in the nearby field.

We picked vegetables from Elfmom’s garden in preparation for Oscar’s arrival on the 6’oclock bus. I was blown away by the beets that Linn dropped into the basket, for I’m currently entrenched in Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, a novel largely concerned with that sweet red root. (It mirrored my surprise a few days ago, when, as I was finishing Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a book about, among other things, an enormous set of thumbs, we took a trip to the zoo at Skansen and I encountered an enormous painted thumb sign advertising the pygmie-marmosets (monkeys small enough to perch on your thumb). Am I living in a Tom Robbins novel? I keep encountering the signs… (Remember, last year, after I returned from this magical land with a headful of mushroom-picking and a bellyfull of fried chanterelles, and plunged right into Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction, where the main characters were obsessed with mushrooms, and particularly with chanterelles.)

Oscar came, we supped, and we watched Conspiracy Theory on tv because it was in English and we’d never seen it before. It was thoroughly stupid, but entertaining enough, especially since the climax was not only filmed on, but actually took PLACE on Roosevelt Island. I love it. I can come out to the Swedish countryside and watch my home on the tv.

The day was full enough, right? With the jam-making, biking, electroshocks and cute Swedish boy? Not so, because after supper, Linn called me out to the balcony and showed me something that I’d never seen before: the Milky Way.

Last time I was here, the sky never got black. This time, oh my. Never so many stars. And I’ve been out in the country. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been in as black a country night as ever there was, upstate New York, for childhood weekends in Jeffersonville at Andrew’s family’s farmhouse and for Asti’s wedding. I’ve been on cruise ships in the middle of the sea. I’ve seen nights full of stars. But never this full. The sky was smeared with stars. White butter on pumpernickel. It was oleoed with them. I thought crazy thoughts, like, “You can’t really understand all the cliches you’ve ever read about stars until you’ve seen them like this”. Which most people have. Gina in her barefoot Ozarks childhood saw skies like these. But not me and my city-mouse eyes.

And remember that my eyes are accustomed to straining and stretching to catch a nightly pinpoint of light at which to direct my obsessive-compuslive wishing. I look for stars whenever I step out under an evening sky. But this was different.

I saw shooting stars. I didn’t even see those at the meteor showers at Sandy Hook that Gina and I have gone out to. I saw not one, but many shooting stars. I stood out on the balcony long after Linn and Oscar went outside, my neck freezing at a 90-degree angle, until Linn came back and coaxed me downstairs to have a look from the lawn. I flopped onto the grass, heedless of the dew (Linn laughed at me but I was going to change into p.j.'s later anyway so what do I care if I get dewy?) and stargazed until I was almost asleep. Every time I thought I should get up and go inside I thought, “Just one more shooting star, then I’ll go in”. I think what I secretly thought was, “The sky will never look like this again.” Even after I went in, I sat up at the window in my room and stared at the Big Dipper until my muscles were stiff. I finally coaxed myself into a slumber position with the following: “The stars have been there for billions of years. They’re not going to go away just because this is the first night YOU’VE really discovered them.”

Why are you in Tavie's head? 3:22 PM | shower me with attention