We are staying in a town, a fifteen-minute train ride from Oslo. Our place is atop a hill: two rooms in the back of a house with a view of fjords and islands. We can hear the freeway at the bottom of the hill but can’t see it. A family of deer frequents the yard, grazing outside the window of where I have a desk.
I have a desk! Although right now I am writing while on the train to Stockholm. I love writing on trains. Anyway, the view.
Looking out the window, I feel like I have all the space in the world, even though kitchen, table, bed, and desk are in one room and stove, refrigerator, couch, and TV are in the other. To do yoga we push the table to the corner, put chairs on the bed, and temper our stretches.
The door is glass—three windows without screens. I am claustrophobic, but I feel free here. One night we mistakenly left the door wide open all night. I got up at 4 am, noticed it open, and left it that way. David would have closed it, but my psychic sense of safety and freedom is an open door or window.
The view changes constantly: clouds, light, the texture of water, changing green hew of the forest. I stare, and twenty minutes have passed. On rainy days we can open the window and feel the big outside world from the small dry indoors.
It is July. It does not get dark until midnight. Infinite days. I get up at 3 am and watch the light that never left, return.
There is an island less than a mile’s walk away that we go to have a picnic lunch. The woods and rock formations look and feel like Northern Minnesota, yet the water is bracken. There are fields for playing soccer and frisbee golf. There is an area for nude swimming and many nooks for private picnics and forest bathing. Yet it is only a mile around! The changing vistas make it feel much bigger. At the bridge to the island are saunas you can rent with platforms for jumping or climbing into the water.
An art museum overlooking a harbor is a two-mile walk, downhill from our place. An installation created by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, The Hymn of Life has spotted paper lanterns, black walls, mirrors and ever-changing lights. I laid down on the floor, batted the lanterns near me, and watched them undulate; illusions of infinity in a closed black room.
There is a sea room with old romantic paintings of ships in a storm and contemporary realist photos of hardworking people doing unglamorous tasks. Also, a full wall painting of dozens of young naked men around a pool watching as one dives. The painting describes the expansive mid-19th-century gay scene in Norway. Around the corner from the naked men is a green photograph of the cables the United States uses to spy on Europe and Russia, cables Edward Snowden wiki-leaked.
While having tea on the museum veranda with a view of the harbor and a giant banana in the sculpture garden, I plugged my phone into an outlet and the café closed before I could retrieve it. The phone was right where I left it the next morning, however, I imagined that during the night it romped in the Infinity Room, took selfies in the Sea Room, and solved a mystery like the kids in the From the Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler.
Next to the museum is a beach frequented by families. We swam before all the kids showed up. After a picnic lunch, we entered a wooded path to see where it might take us, discovering a peninsula that felt as though it never ended, it just loops after two miles of small paths into deep woods paths covered in raspberries and juneberries with coves of private beaches where groups of 1-10 people were swimming, and sunbathing.
Countless spots for public privateness in urban wilderness.
People don’t greet strangers in Norway, (discussed in next blog). This increases the sense that space is all for you; no need to acknowledge the other. Though this was not how I was brought up, after 48 years in Minnesota— a state with a deep Scandinavian ethos—I am acclimated and comfortable with this practice of bubble-wrapping personal space.
A few months from now endless dark will replace endless light. The rain will turn to snow, and the hill we now live on will be a treacherous white, grey, and black-crud, climb. I would feel trapped here in winter, unable to open windows or sleep with the door open, or walk without fear of falling on ice. In winter we will be in Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, and Greece, pursuing an endless temperate climate, a different ethos of personal space, Aging on the Run.
Next blog: Oslo.
