Tag Archives: Scandinavia

Foodie Tuesday: Season’s Eatings

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Up on the roof there arose such a clatter! Nothing like a good dawn thunderstorm to ring in Christmas Day. No, really. Great rain falling here is an excellent present, and the drum rolls and fireworks that introduced it just made its entrance the grander. It’s not exactly the fabled White Christmas for which so many yearn, but I’ll take a good Texas rainstorm as a true gift all the same. Somehow it makes the need for cozy nesting seem all the more apropos and real in a place where I’ve yet to fully adapt to the concept of a two-week-long winter season. So, Merry Christmas to me.

photoIt also heightens and enhances the glow of our seasonal lights–the few white sparklers on the front porch, the reflection off the shiny little red Texas star ornaments I hung from the dining room light fixture, and the candles glowing warmly at table, as well as the flickering fire in the living room fireplace. Whether it’s for Christmas or it’s my gentile substitute for a menorah, or it’s simply a sign of the inner warmth to be cultivated when all of the world’s holidays converge at this time of year, the beauty and comfort and symbolism of both candlelight and firelight is a gift too.

photoThen again, a White Christmas really is an extraordinary thing in Texas–northern or not–and at about 1:45 pm local time our lovely rain actually turned into an even more lovely snowfall. First the smattering of sleet that intermixed with the raindrops began to look ever so slightly whiter, and gradually it transformed into genuine flakes falling, even sticking, on the trees, the roof, the yard, the path. Quite a pretty sight, and one that will continue to water the thirsty ground but also look grand in the meantime.

photoSo I can greet you all with a completely sincere sense of winter, Christmastime, and the holidays in general and wish you the same glorious warmth and sweetness my husband and I are enjoying here, hunkered down in our cozy home with my dear mother and father in law [who road-tripped down here from Seattle for the occasion], and sending thoughts of love and peace and hope and joy to all of our family and friends around the globe. Some of the Norwegian contingent (my youngest sister and her husband and daughter) are with the Washingtonian bunch, celebrating the holidays in the cool and rainy Northwest, while the rest of the Norwegians are back in Scandinavia, some nephews and their families in the Oslo area and the youngest nephew having a quick break with the family but back to the recording studio in Stockholm with his band shortly after the holidays, if I remember right. Loved ones all around the world, whether related by blood or marriage or by the strong bonds of friendship and collegiality and camaraderie are all held especially tightly in our hearts at this time of year, adding to the warmth and glow of the candlelit house battened down cheerily against the light crisp cold of the snow.

photoIn my typical fashion, I celebrated the day by sleeping late, and we all snagged Christmas breakfast in bits and bobs–coffee here, toast there, cereal for another, and so forth–while sitting around the kitchen table chattering about everything and nothing. The later meals in the day are more significant times to set the table a tiny bit more formally, but we’re not much for standing on ceremony in our clan on either side, so the food is unfussy so that we can enjoy the company rather than slaving over the cookery. Lunch was pot roast, made a while ago and frozen and then simply heated in the oven, with roasted potatoes and carrots and some buttery green beans, accompanied with Pinotage for the red wine drinkers and hard apple cider for the others, and for dessert, glasses of eggnog and pieces of my homemade fudge with lots of mixed nuts (previously soaked walnuts, homemade candied/spiced almonds, and salted pecans and macadamia nuts) chopped in it so rampantly as to make it fall apart. Not very decorative, but not too bad to eat all the same. Simplicity trumps presentation nearly every time in my kitchen.photo

Supper will be even less glamorous and perhaps equally quirky for holiday feasting by the popular standards, yet equally edible. We’re having homemade macaroni and cheese with champagne. I think that pairing pretty much says it all for how I operate as a hostess and as an eater, and the tolerance with which family and friends treat me when they spend time in my company. And that, of course, is the acme of celebrating, to my taste: surround yourself with the best and dearest of people who will love you no matter what you do or don’t do, and sit back with them and enjoy it. I wish each and every one of you the same privilege and pleasure, whether you’re celebrating any holidays yourself or not, and to all the world, I send my hopes for peace and comfort and hope for all the days ahead.photo

Musick has Charms

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The charms of music can, indeed, soothe the savage breast–and it can bring the terrible savage right out of the calm breast just as well. It’s a power that few can resist, love the music or not; it gets under the skin and slides on into the soul. The marvels of music are not, as you know, unknown to me and yes, I have been both incited and soothed at various times by it.

But I haven’t lived the life of total immersion. That is, as are most fully engulfing passions, left to the titans of the art. Not necessarily people known and celebrated by a large and laudatory world, indeed, but those who, whether in that pop-culture celebrity way or from deep in the dark of the behind-scenes action or somewhere in between have shaped history in whatever bold or subtle way their particular art could do.

I said I was going to be a bit dark and Halloween-ish these days, but I was reminded that this day deserves a different kind of recognition, being a memorable date of another kind altogether: the birthday of one of those titans of musical arts aforementioned. So you get a break from my grimmer humors while I bow to a great musician and a lovely man.pen & ink drawing

My husband, you ask? No, I would surely call him both as well, but I refer just now to one of the musicians who helped pave the way for my spouse, inspires him in his work, and befriended him both professionally and personally in ways that made it more possible for my partner to be quite the accomplished musician and artist that he himself is. I’m talking about the man sometimes known as the godfather of Swedish choral music, Eric Ericson.

He is celebrated by far more than just his family and friends, more even than his numerous choirs’ members and his almost countless students, because he stood at the center of an almost unbelievable burst of musical art flowering in the little Scandinavian nation of his birth and spreading throughout and beyond Europe quite immediately after World War II, sooner than it should have happened by rights except that his own country remained neutral and mainly untouched by the physical depredations of the war, and enough so that a number of outstanding leaders in culture took refuge there during and after the war, creating a remarkable hothouse where those fertile minds could put their restless art to work, and often did so together.

He is celebrated also because, as one of the central figures in this new bloom of music, he helped to shape the whole modern state of choral music, both in the church and in secular circles, in Sweden and to foster its wide spread via his own work and travels, via that of his artistic and intellectual partners and rivals and colleagues, and especially via the many, many young musicians that between them they all trained and sent off into the wide world. Their collective influence, expanding at the virtual rate of plant cell division and sending tendrils around the globe, is a rich and vital gift that will long outlive them all.pen & ink drawing

Thankfully, Eric Ericson, for one, is going to give that theory a run for it, as he has attained more than ninety years already himself. And his artistic offspring will undoubtedly keep the music sounding and growing for a very long time too, and for that I am happy and grateful indeed. We who love choral music today owe him thanks.

With that, I will say that the gracious and generous kindness that he and his dear wife have shown on a personal level to both my husband and me makes me as glad as anything to think of him on this day with great admiration and fondness. I hope that every note I have seen him conduct, heard him play on the piano while conducting and discussing the finer points of music or listened to him hum under his breath as he recollected another bit of his own fascinating and incredibly complex history as a musician will linger in the atmosphere for many years yet to come, and that in turn, no matter where on that spectrum of artistic or intellectual accomplishment any one of the rest of us happens to perch, we too will make our own kind of music echo happily in the hearts of all those whose lives we touch.

Happy birthday, Eric Ericson, may the music you hear always soothe and delight you.pen & ink drawing

Around the World and into My Own Backyard

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monotype

There are certain ubiquitous characteristics of my life in travel . . .

I’m hitting the road, or rather, taking to the air, on Monday. It brings to mind so many aspects of my own experiences in traveling over the years.

The first, in this instance, is that my feet develop a distinctly leaden quality and my heart begins to follow them, when it comes to taking off sans Sweetie. But no one gets to travel with his or her favorite road-tripping partner every time. At the moment, this is an opportunity to join with my parents and the part of the family currently in western Washington in the adventure of getting Mom and Dad relocated from their home of many years to a new apartment in Seattle. A dramatic change in their lives–in the whole family’s lives–to be sure, and one that promises to be both physically and emotionally challenging but I expect will be at least equally exciting and fulfilling as it plays out. I wish my spouse could share in all of that, not to mention that I simply don’t like being apart. Having connected with each other a tad later in life than many, and just plain enjoying each other’s company hugely, we begrudge any time not shared. But that has to be beside the point at times, when the road calls for whatever reasons. So off I go.

Another constant in my life of travels is that the unexpected is inevitable. I hope more than I can possibly express that it doesn’t ever again include my suddenly throwing up in the middle of the metal detector arch at airport security (SORRY, O’Hare TSA workers! Really I am, I grovel at your feet! It was the flu talking!). I’m quite glad too if the unforeseen doesn’t include missed or canceled flights or lost luggage, but seeing as how I’ve survived all of the foregoing, I will grit my teeth and go along through to get to the good stuff on the other side. There are unexpected gifts and heaps of happiness that come with being out of my usual groove, too. Shared laughter with strangers that turns into a mile-spanning, long-lived friendship. Directions to the wrong place, but one that turns out to be far more interesting and memorable than the intended one. A grim-looking last-chance eatery where the food is miraculously fabulous and the proprietors simply underfunded gastronomic gods. The out-of-the-way garden, happened upon in a blasting rainstorm, that offers a tree so massive and dense in its canopy that everyone escapes the blast under it in warm and dry conviviality.

The monotype illustration above is from a series I made on returning from my very first trip abroad, where my older sister and I spent over three months exploring from England to Norway and back, visiting nearly a dozen countries in between, and there I learned for the first time that there are certain rhythms and patterns to this travel thing. We developed a set of Rules to explain our experience, including the one illustrated here, that All winter trains run on time except the one you are about to board, which arrives just shortly after you have become one with the permafrost (or something to that effect). There were definitions of what to expect from technology (The handrail of an escalator is always set to move at a rate just enough higher than the rate of the steps that if you keep your hand on the rail, by the time you reach the top of the escalator you will be lying face down in a pile of chewed gum), from museums (All museums shall be free of charge and open seven days a week, except the one you most want to visit, which costs the equivalent of six college credits and is open only during a full lunar eclipse), and from bag stowing systems (The overhead racks on trains are designed to fit bags no larger than four bars of soap placed side by side, and may be constructed of silly putty and yarn).

But we also saw that grand benevolent side of what happens when you venture outside of your personal castle. There were relatives and family friends who knew us only through our parents and perhaps a contact or two along the years but willingly took us in and gave us the full visiting-royalty treatment when we’d hoped at most for a chance to meet over coffee. A pâtissier whose exquisite goods suddenly went on sale when he learned that we had come into the country overnight, arriving on the weekend when we had no access to a bank for currency exchange, and were a couple of pitiful looking famished students. The driver of the night’s last bus to town from a ferry crossing, who delivered the handful of after-hours stragglers on board each to our individual destination instead of wherever his route should land us.

I have seen so much more of this side of travel in the years since than that grubbier and less inviting one, that I can’t help having a little buzz of anticipation at any trip, even the seemingly predictable one of heading toward family and to my own old stomping grounds. I know that unexpected pleasures await. That undeserved happiness is always in store. I am going to see people and places I’ve known since birth, but every time I see them with new eyes because the earth has turned just so much, the calendar pages pulling me, us, them all forward into some new configuration. If I’m looking for the exotic, a fresh new hour means that everyone and everything in it have been in some way made different and what I find when we meet up is bound to be in that way a wonderful revelation of joy and surprise.

mixed media watercolor on paper

Another rule of travel: if I look for it, every journey offers something wonderful and new . . .