She will kill me for putting this in print, but when we were teenagers we cut up bridal magazines and taped pictures of flowing white dresses and bouquets of roses into our notebooks. Before you judge, let me just say that I was a budding feminist at that point, one who wanted to rule a courtroom and the volleyball court before I would think about signing my life away to a man (And I'd certainly never take his name, whoever he ended up being). Cindy was a beautiful, funny girl, an artist, and didn't necessarily want to rule anything. I played sports and she did ballet. Together we went to youth group once a week. We were good Christian girls. And we spent the occasional Sunday afternoon cross-legged on the carpet cutting up bridal magazines because that was one of those sweet, senseless, innocent things good Christian girls did. Like saying our prayers, taking Communion, honoring our fathers and mothers.

Our last perfect weather day was last Thursday. I took the bus to Lysaker to drop something at Jonathan's office and afterward I took a walk.

The water gulped against the wood and stone side of the pier below me. I was thirty feet up on a flat, grassy space between several buildings, glass and concrete exteriors housing posh condos with an extensive view of the fjord. Four men sat at the end of the pier, fishing poles aloft, tackle swinging and blinking in the sunlight. A small yacht was moored there, too, but all I could see were the long white masts and the smart red and blue flag.

There was quiet except for the scuttled chasings of two yellow-billed magpie. They swirled against each other, so close I could see the teal patches on their wings. They snickered and hopped back into the short hedges nearby. I watched them for a while and then bowed my head to read and scribble in the margins of my book. Everyone once in a while I took a sip of my lemon soda.

These days I favor my lemonades and sodas flavored with citron. It is a flavor I will forever associate with this time in my life - perfect days when the words had all the time in the world to conceive themselves in my mind and come to me.

More than one perfect day has been squandered since my arrival in Norway, of course. My cup runneth over with time and dreams coming true; my cup is so full that some time and dreams have been lost. I cannot mourn them now, though. There is too much to record. I am a journalist as much as I am a poet.

Last night our Norwegian instructor asked about our hobbies.

"Jeg skriver... poems," I said, because I've been writing poetry again, but I lacked the correct word for poems.

"Dikt," he said.

"Pardon me?"

"Dikt. Du skriver dikt," he said, chortling behind his answer. "Liker ikke du det? Hvorfor ikke?" You don't like it? Why not?

"Nei! Jeg liker ikke det! Fordi... Because that's a terribly ugly word for something as pretty as a poem!"

To soften the blow he added that the Norwegian word for poet is also poet, and the word for poetry is poesi. Now that's more like it.

So I record these bits of language that keep my life so interesting in this Nordic land. I record the weather, the street names, the tragedies, the carnivals. I have a responsibility to the page, and that truth, as esoteric as it is, keeps my pen moving, especially on the perfect days.

I paused in my scribbling last Thursday to watch as a motor boat cut a curve in the water and turned back on its own wake to thump its stern against the waves. My lemonade was pale yellow and only half full. The skinny, triangular Norwegian flag atop the yacht's mast nearby curled and unfurled at turns in the breeze. The sun warmed my back, and I wrote:

This is the stuff of my life, and as long as I can put it down in ink, my heart may be at peace.

I will be haunted by John Haines's The Stars, the Snow, the Fire for many years to come. The ease (or grace) with which he handled the brutality of hunting and trapping lulled me into a deceptive calm, but his imagery was too graphic to pass by without a reaction. However, his essay Ice was one I read over and over, not because it was violent, though that brand of his writing was present, but because there was a certain rhythm to the storytelling in Ice that made me want to read it again, deeper, slower, searching for something, a rhythm generated by the way he related time and space.

Many of his essays are told from the here and now, a bold tense. Ice is no different. Haines begins by dropping the reader to her hands and knees in the snow to find the places "away from the sun, in ravines and hollows where the ground is normally wet." In these places, "the soil has darkened and is hard and cold to the touch. The deep, shaded mosses have stiffened, and there are tiny crystals of ice in their hairy spaces" (Haines, 126). Every word generates a sensory experience. I can see, feel, even smell these dark places. 

Haines snaps from that sequence to thoughts of the river. The heavy frost reminds him that the river is changing. "The sound of that water, though distant, comes strong and pervasive over the dry land crusted with snow: a deep and swallowed sound, as if the river had ice in its throat" (Haines, 126). He takes "the steep path downhill to the riverbed" and stands at the shoreline where, "Free of its summer load of silt, the water is clear in the shallows, incredibly blue and deep in the middle of the channel... Here where the current slackens and deepens, the water is heavy and slow with ice, with more ice and more ice" (Haines, 127). With all her senses, the reader is deep in the present tense.

Which is why Haines moves suddenly to a recollection of the past, the way memories come to all of us. Memories are sparked by a sound, a scent, even the feel of a certain material against the skin. In this case, the color of the water and the smell of the ice remind Haines of "past years when [he] came to a channel much like this one, in mid-October with only an inch or two of snow on the gravel bars, to fish for salmon" (Haines, 128). He describes the way he "watched for the glowing red and pink forms of salmon on their way upriver in the last run of the season, "and then the way his gaffing hook "made a nasty gash in the side of the salmon, and fish blood soon stained the snow where [he] piled them, one by one" (Haines, 128). That memory reminds him what it felt like to be part of "something grand and barbaric in that essential, repeated act... a feeling intensified, made rich by the smell of ice and cold fish-slime, by the steely color of the winter sky, and the white snow stained with the redness of the salmon: the color of death and the color of winter" (Haines, 128).

Still Life. Stopping before Cezanne's painting, I see exactly what there is to see. A rough-hewn table. Burnished fruits rolling off a solid white plate. The shining curve of a wine glass, empty. Curtains folded back into a thick darkness. A window or wall. And a pitcher painted with flowers.

 

Of course, this painting on the wall of Oslo's National Gallery isn't Cezanne's only work titled "Nature Morte." He painted this scene or one quite like it many times, over and over again. And even though I took Art History classes in college, I couldn't have begun to tell you why. Until yesterday.

Last semester, I had the opportunity to work with author Jane Brox. Even though I received sound, encouraging feedback on each of my submissions to her, I still felt that I was struggling. Of course, I had to meet my deadlines with her while living in an empty house in California (all of my possessions were on a cargo ship somewhere on the Atlantic), missing Jonathan (who had moved to Oslo ten weeks ahead of me), and then I had to find the time to write, revise, and submit one last time while making the final move overseas. I pulled it off, but barely, and I was thrilled when summer came and I had a break.

Jane saw me through those tumultuous few months. She handled every submission with care, and when I received her critiques by mail, I read them hungrily. Two or three times. She has a way of putting her finger through the pulse to the true heartbeat of any problem. Or, as she's more generous than I am with my work, I'll say she found a way to outline the foundational "challenge" I was facing when it came to my writing.

Yesterday I pulled out her critiques again, and today I pulled the following quote from one of those critiques and took it to heart:

"In a way, yours is the challenge of the still life painter, who places before her a mortar and pestle, a ceramic bowl, a few onions, and a copper pot to paint. If the painter sees only those objects as physical things to be painted and nothing else, then the painting can't really go beyond the realm of an exercise. But painters like Chardin or Cezanne or Morandi saw something more in the objects they set before themselves to paint: the objects in front of them and the ideal. They brought to the canvas particular ideas about shape and form and color and perception that infused their work. They spent countless hours arranging the objects so as to give the whole specific shape and form and flow. These things might not be apparent to the casual observer but they are apparent to anyone who really looks at the work. They were painting the objects and they were painting much more than the objects at the same time."