Kitchen Gnomes (Part 2)

 

On the small wooden corner shelf in my kitchen you'll find my wooden gnomes. (The other items are there all year round.) The shelf itself belonged to my paternal grandmother, and once upon a time used to sit in her kitchen. 

The wooden house (a model of a kind of storehouse that used to be common in the north of Sweden) comes from my mum's side of the family (my maternal grandfather was from "up north") - and so does the little carved dog. The boat-like thing next to the house is a souvenir bought on a family trip up north in my early teens - a wooden cup, a traditional Sami kind of item. The little ceramic deer and the "nutty" squirrel were presents from friends some time in the past; and the little grey gnome I think was originally part of some Christmas flower arrangement. 

The two gnomes to the left on the middle shelf I remember buying when visiting a Christmas market in a friend's church back in my upper teens. And the grey one on the same shelf was a Christmas gift from a Swedish penfriend some 20+ years ago. 

A random collection of things, but with one thing in common: 
They're all bearers of memories of family and friends.

Old Friends and Ten Thousand Questions

Months ago on someone’s blogroll I came across a link to Ten Thousand Questions, a blogsite which asks a question a day, without wanting answers or links. (Just a tip, in case you ever find yourself in the mood for introspection, and/or suffering from blogger’s block!)

This week, they had questions on the theme of “Old Friends”, which set me on a walk down Memory Lane. One I found particularly interesting, and I thought I’d share it here, along with my thoughts:

 

Which of your friends wins the prize for introducing you to the largest number of your other friends?

For me there is no easy answer to this, but it set me thinking… How one thing (or friendship) may lead to another, and far from always “in a straight line”…

When I was about five years old, I moved with my parents from the town where I was born, to a nearby village. Across the street from our first house lived a girl one year younger than me. Let’s call her A. We weren’t in the same class at school and we weren’t each other’s closest friends; but friends. In our early teens, she was the one to first ask me to come along with her to a church youth group; which I did, and for me that led, both directly and indirectly, to lots of new friendships and experiences in the years to come.

In roundabout ways, it was also through that context that I first met B - even though she lived in a different town, and back then I actually  knew her sisters better than her.

But when at the age of 20 I moved away from home to study, it was B who became the one to introduce me to my next circle of (church) friends in that town (which was neither her home town nor mine).

B and I lived only one year in the same town before she moved away (incidentally, to my birth town, and so we continued to keep in touch).

One or two years later, within the same circle of friends that B first introduced me to, I got to know C. 

And it was with C that I first went on a summer course/camp at a Bible school in  the south-east of Sweden, where I met D (and actually also one or two others who later on became close friends as well).

D and her husband happened to live in the town where my parents grew up, and which I knew from many visits to both sets of grandparents. In the next few years I also visited D and her family there a few times.

And at the age of 30, I moved to that town myself – i.e. the same place where I still live. I moved into a flat in the same building where D and family were also living; and some of their friends also became my first friends in this town.

Which friend deserves the most credit for introducing me to the largest number of other friends, I really can’t say. It gets even more complicated if one starts to try to sort out who counts as old friend… Everyone who was once upon a time a close friend, even if we are no longer keeping in touch? Or only the ones I’m still seeing /talking to /writing to /hearing of now and then?

A and I lost touch decades ago. She married early, and I moved away; and in the last twenty years I haven’t been back to my birth town at all (i.e. not since my parents also moved away from there). With B, C and D, I’m still keeping more or less updated, either by direct contact or through mutual friends (or both).

But thinking back like this… It strikes me that if not for A, I might never have known any of the other people in a long chain of friendships stretching through 40+ years (and actually even across the earth).

…

(PS. As they often put it in newspaper articles: In reality, A, B, C and D have other names… not even beginning with those initials…)

What’s New?

I bought new curtains for the kitchen – decided I needed a “treat” after all the work put into getting my home back to normal after the change of windows.

A friend came by on a surprise visit yesterday and insisted that she wanted to buy me flowers - she didn’t want to buy them before she came as she wasn’t sure I’d be home… So I ended up going with her for a short walk to the nearby florist’s and got to choose which ones I wanted. I picked the cheerful orange chrysanthemums for a bit of autumn colour.

The white cyclamen I got from another friend three weeks ago… Last Friday, she moved to Australia! (It has not quite sunk in yet that she’s actually gone…)

Here, autumn is upon us now, with the trees changing colours from one day to another…

 

Today has been one of those days when the weather shifts from minute to minute  - and we even had sunshine and torrential rain simultaneously!

The last three photos are from a short walk this morning (in rain and sunshine).

Friends in a Box

Scrolling back through my new timeline layout in Facebook I was reminded of another “in the box” story (compare yesterday’s post). In a FB comment just before New Year, I mentioned that I intended to have friends over for the occasion. Mysteriously, as I was writing, the word friends caused an automatic suggestion to pop up  that maybe I meant FRIENDS as in the TV show!

Actually it was a little spooky, because I was in the middle of re-watching that series on DVD. But how on earth could Facebook know? And rather rude of them to suggest that I’d have nothing better to do on a New Year’s Eve! (Not to mention that the assumption on this particular occasion was actually wrong…)

Why it happened has remained a mystery – until now. I just figured it out. It so happened that when writing that status update, I used the phrase “me + friends”. It seems it was the + that did it! (Perhaps you already knew that. But I didn’t!)

Weekend Reflections: Imprint

It wasn’t until I got the photos up on the screen that I saw it.
The reflection of me and my camera on the the shiny roller of a textile printing machine at the Textile Museum…

Linked to Weekend Reflections

Actually I do feel a bit ‘flattened out’ after this week – with more activities going on than what I’m used to in a ‘normal’ week. Although I suspect that what I mean by a ‘normal’ week is more like some kind of average that rarely occurs in reality!

Anyway, from Tuesday afternoon until Thursday morning I had two dear friends of mine staying. Gunilla and I have been friends for 36 years. Here whole life she has been under the pressure of a complicated set of health issues which I’m not going into. But she’s one of the most inspiring and positive people I know; always making the best out of every situation. She’s definitely a friend who has made a lasting and colourful imprint on my life.

When they arrived on Tuesday she was in better health than I’ve seen her in a long time. Unfortunately when she left on Thursday she was not feeling so good and had lost her voice – I have to point out, not entirely due to our incessant talking… She must have picked up an infection before she came here. 

In spite of that, we managed to make good use of our Wednesday together. I took them (or maybe they took me – it was they who had the car) to see the Textile Museum; and after that we had an excellent lunch in a Greek restaurant, and then a nice walk (in wheelchair for G) through the town park (past some of our ‘famous’ sculptures) back to where we had parked the car. It was a fine and sunny autumn day, even if on the chilly side.

As they left on Thursday morning, they gave me a lift to the hospital for my usual time in the rehab pool.  When I got back home from there I immediately had to start shifting focus to entirely different matters; which however I think I’ll leave for a future post, having rambled on for a good while here already.

Gifted

   

Thank you all who commented on my Sunday post by sending me good wishes for my birthday. Sandra wanted to know what was in the parcel I mentioned in the Sunday post. It was from from my friend Gunilla, and it turned out to contain a collection of postcards of water colours painted by a gifted artist friend of ours, Lena. Lena gets most of her inspiration from the province of Bohuslän on the Swedish west coast, which is also where she usually exhibits her art in the summer. Below are three of the pictures included in the card collection I got. (The card in the photo above, with the parcel, is not hers though.) You can also see these and more of Lena’s work at her own website and the Swedish Artists website:

  

I received more birthday greetings in the post yesterday; among them a gift certificate from my brother, allowing me to choose a number of albums from the website www.legalsounds.com, and he’ll download them onto discs for me. So I’ll take the opportunity to renew a few old favourites I used to have on LPs and cassette tapes. I also got a copy of my brother’s own album Trek.

Otherwise my celebrations yesterday were mostly “on line” by email, Facebook and telephone! Outside, it kept on raining…