Britt-Arnhild's House in the Woods

Make time for creativity

@brittarnhild

 

Our daughter Ingrid, her husband and their two boys have joined us at the cabin. The days are filled with sun and blue sky, and with hours of work. We are in the progress of planning a new, little cabin, with tow rooms, mostly to have a few extra beds, and Terje wants to do most of it himself. This includes the cutting down of 25 huge fir, cutting them into logs and them prepare the fundament of the cabin.

I have volunteered to cook, and to find time for creativity in between.

Like colouring with Milian 6.

 

Like picking and painting daisies.

 

Like cooking a huge pot of fish soup for supper.

 

Hiking in favourite landscape

@brittarnhild

Open landscape. West in Norway. On the shores of the North Sea.
My favourite landscape.

I drove as far as I got and then hiked. Terje biked from our cabin, for one hour, and met me at the spot where we have the best view and where we usually have our coffee.

 

The Norwegian name of this flower is tiriltunge (lotus corniculatus in Latin) When I was a child I used to call it Maria gullsko, Mary's gold shoe. I love that name.

Let me tell you a fact about myself.
I collect books about flowers, floras.I have loads and love to look through them, to read about flowers, learn about their names, to use the illustrations as inspiration for drawings........
And a kind of "fun fact", I am in the process of knitting a flora. Yes, knitting!. I call it "fars_flora" (father's flora) and I want it to be a kind of memorial of my dad who passed away in February. He loved flowers and passed his love on to me.

I will tell you more about fars_flora in a later post.

My pot of gold

@brittarnhild

 

Here you have the proof.
My pot of gold is here, just here, among the sunflowers at our cabin.

We  hope to spend much of the summer here. In the middle of nature. Among birds and trees and flowers. And the world's most amazing view. Just Terje and me, but also with children and grandchildren. And friends.

Simple living.
Electricity, yes. But for water we need to walk to the well to fill our two plastic buckets.

I will cook
I will read
I will knit
I will write
I will hike
I will fish
I will smile
I will laugh
I will cry
I will sleep
I will be awake
I will breath
I will wash my hair
I will talk
I will be quiet
I will be happy
I will be sad
I will sing
I will pray

I will live

 

Yes, I will simply live. All the colours of the rainbow.

Small wonders

@brittarnhild

 

A green spider I've never seen before.

 

Three white columbines in a beautiful vase.

 

The first cornflowers.

 

These are a few of my favourite things.......and they show me there is a Creator behind.

 

 

Back and forth

@brittarnhild

 

 

Back home again.

We have no plans for long travels this summer, but will most probably go back and forth between home and cabin. We are planning a kind of extension at the cabin, a small cottage with two rooms. This means quite a lot of preparations. At the some time there are things to be done at home as well, and our garden has never been as beautiful as it is this year, and I want to enjoy it as much as possible. So here we are :-)

After all the rain we've had recently we are looking forward to a sunny, mild day tomorrow, and I plan to spend all of it out in the garden. Always a lot to be dome out there. I started this afternoon, but the most important thing to do today was to walk around enjoying the flowers.

 

Here is one of the bouquets I picked. Isn't it beautiful :-) In my favourite colours.

Graves from the bronze ages

@brittarnhild

I did a hike today while Terje had another appointment. We often hike near the church, but today I found some paths I'd never walked before. I was hoping for low tide, but actually the water was very high, which made the walk quite spectacular.

What took me by surprise was that along the way I came to an area with graves, or burials back from the Bronze Age. I don't know the English name of these graves. May be cairns? An information board told me that the area was important during the Bronze Age, and also during the time of the Vikings.

I reflected on history while I walked on, enjoying the beauty of nature.

Aren't these sea thrifts beautiful!

A coolcation day

@brittarnhild

 

Have you already heard the new word, coolcation?  More and more tourists from further south are coming to Norway and the other Nordic countries for vacation now. They flee the heath waves further south, to enjoy the cool, fresh air up here. Terje and I have no plans to go far this summer. We will divide our time between home and the cabin, and may be drive up to Lofoten for a week in August to visit family. Just now we are at our cabin, on the western coast of Norway, enjoying our cool weather, and also feeling blessed when we from time to time get days like yesterday, when the sun was out and the temperatures reached 20 degrees Celsius, almost. Today was another chapter. The sun had again hit behind the clouds, beaten by rain showers. We are stubborn descendants of the vikings though, we grabbed our waterproof coats and headed for a day in the nearby town Kristiansund. And had a most agreeable coolcation day.

 

 

 

And then it was my mother's time to leave.......

@brittarnhild

 

May 23rd, three months after my father died, it was my mother's turn to follow. She died peacefully in her own home, and is now  reunited with my dad in eternity. Dad was 92, mum was 95.

During the funeral we had a musician playing a few of the pieces my mother used to play.