Britt-Arnhild's House in the Woods

The day when everything was blue

@brittarnhild

"Where shall we go today?" This is the first question we ask ourselves in the morning. And with beautiful nature all around, it is never difficult to find an answer, or rather many answers. There are so many places we want to go. Yesterday we climbed a mountain (I plan to blog about it in Blåklokkeveien), so today we took quite another route, out to the sea.

We are now at the mouth of the Trondheim´s Fjord bay, an area which was important both for Norwegians and Germans during WWII. The Germans occupied the area for some time during the war, and it is now a kind of memorial, where you can learn more about what really happened.

Today everything is peaceful. And everything is blue.
A perfect day for selfies.

 

Days like these are shining beads in my necklace of life.

 

A necklace which is easy to wear........

...on blue days.

A falling tree and a cabin with a view

@brittarnhild

We love the trees at our cabin. Every single one of them. They are the homes of birds and squirrels. The wind play in them. They are the most wonderful sign of life and hope.

Living trees grow. Sometimes too fast, too high. And for a long time now I have wanted to have the huge fir tree right in front of the cabin cut down.

Today it happened, and I can´t get enough of our "new" view.

The Sunday Gardener at the cabin garden. Fir branches on Palm Sunday.

@brittarnhild

Spring always comes to the cabin garden before it comes to The Blue Garden outside the House in the Woods. We came out to the cabin today to spend Easter break here, and the first thing I did was to inspect the garden.

Under the fir branches daffodils, primulas, tulips and crocuses are trying to find their way out to freedom. In the herb garden chives, mint, parsley and melissa is growing, ready to use already, the fruit trees have tiny little mouse ear buds, the roses all seem to have survived and the forsythia is bursting with yellow buds ready to bloom.

 

I walk around, removing the fir branches.

Today is Palm Sunday. The fir becomes my palm branches. The praise of spring and new life, a praise for My King.

 

 

Easter Break

@brittarnhild

At 3pm I closed my work computer and walked out into the spring day, wrapping myself in the pleasurable knowledge that I have a 10 days Easter Break ahead of me.

The cabin is waiting for us, but not until Sunday.

Before that we plan to find our breath again. The slow, comfortable breath of time enough.

We start tonight,
by unwrapping the Christmas gift our two sons gave us:
a token to one of the gourmet restaurants in Trondheim.

To Rom og Kjøkken.
Two Rooms and a Kitchen.

 

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and as soon as I get my breah away I hope to be back blogging on a daily basis again.

 

Like a painting

@brittarnhild

The most active birds on our garden these days are the siskins. They come early in the morning and never stop eating until all the sunflower seeds are gone. They sing, they fly around and they make a lovel mess of the seed shells. I love them. They are sky though, and it is almost impossible to come close enough to get a good photo.

I love this one though. Looks like a painting, doesn´t it :-)

A 12 hours drive

@brittarnhild

"Tell me something about your childhood, will you? An early memory?"
Terje and I were sitting in the car, a long drive. 12 hours down on Thursdag, 12 hours back home on Sunday. Long hours for silence, listening to the radio, and talking. We had been quiet for some time, we both love silence, both of us thinking of the task ahead of us, emptying Terje´s childhood home, making it ready to be sold.

The silence continued and I wondered if Terje had been too deep in thoughts to hear my question. But after a while: "I remember one spring we had a lamb. We got it from the farm of dad´s uncle. We fed it with milk from a baby bottle and the lamb became tame. Like a pet. We knew that the lamb would be slaughtered in late autumn, but that was life and it didn´t stop us to love and cherish it as long as we had it. When the cold days of autumn came we let the lamb come with us inside. It loved to sleep in front of the oven in the little room behind the kitchen." Terje looked at me and smiled: "My mother even taught the lamb to pee on the potty."

 "Another year we had ducks. Again they were meant for food in the winter, again we loved them. Dad made a small pond to them, and a fence to keep them on our land. But they never tried to fly away. They got ducklings which we gave away to the kids next door. One time we took our to ducks over to the now quite big ducklings, and they all started to fight. Man, they scared us."

A 12 hours drive passes fast when you do it with someone you love!

The photos are from the garden were Terje spent his childhood. Some crocuses and snowdrops came home with us.

 

To say goodbye

@brittarnhild

We are back at Moi, my husband´s birthplace, to say goodbye to his childhood home for a last time. My mother in law died 10 years ago. My father in law continued to live in the house he had built with his own hands about 60 years ago until last summer. Then he moved into a care home, and we started the task of emptying the house. In December my father in law died, 91 years old (he would have been 92 in two days today), and our laborious work continued.

The work is finished now, and this weekend Terje and I are down here with a huge, rented car, to bring home all the stuff we want to keep in the family.

I have been walking around with my camera, saying good bye to the house, to my parents in law, to almost 40 years of my life, my own way.

Behind this wall my father in law had his carpentry workshop. So many millions of hours of labour of love have been spent there.

Handwritten notes still hanging in the porch wall. My father in law´s handwriting. Notes ready to be glued on the door when he went out in the garden or down in his basement workshop to work. "In the garden" "I am in the basement"

 

The vegetable garden. Last summer father in law grew pumkins here and made dozens of kilos of pumpkin marmelade and pickled pumpkins.

The old apple tree.
One year, when our boys were about 10, they flew down to their grandparents alone and spent a week with them. I let them bring my camera, looking forward to see what photos they would take, and laughed after the film was developed. The boys played hide and seek in the garden, took photos of each other when they hid and wanted me to seek for then in the photos :-) Many of the photos showed this tree, sometimes I saw one of the boys in there, some times not.

Oh, such wonderful memories.

The top window is the window to the bedroom which has been mine ever since I came here at Easter 1979, deeply in love with the oldest son of the house.

The love is just as deep, even deeper today. And my heart is filled with memories.

 

Knitting in progress

@brittarnhild

My niece Tone has found the love of her life, and September there will be a wedding. A few weeks ago I got a message in my phone: Hi dear auntie, I have a question for you......I have seen a knitted wedding cardigan which I so dearly want for my own wedding, but I am not sure if I have the skills needed to make it myself. So now I wonder if you have the time and possibility to knit it for me......

Of course I said yes :-)

I will keep you updated as this very special project of love unfolds.

 

The mornings are mine

@brittarnhild

I leave home early these days, and I work long days. But as always, I try to give myself some "just me" moments. For some days now I have taken another bus downtown. A bus which takes a completely different route, which takes 10 extra minutes, and which makes me feel I am a traveller exploring new land.

The bus is almost empty when I find a seat. I take my kindle out of my backpack and start to read. For the moment I am reading Edith Wharton´s  House of Mirth. I read for a few minutes. I only use my kindle on the bus so the books I read from it take a long time), but as more and more passengers get on the bus, I spend longer and longer time to read one page. I watch people and I try to imagine their lives. The middle aged couple from somewhere in Asia, China? Nepal? Tibet? who waits on the bus at the same stop every morning. The young father completely in love with his little baby girl, the old man who came one morning and left the bus at the hospital stop, the African mother and her son who told funny tales from his school day.........

When I arrive at my stop I decide to continue to the next, which means I can walk over the marketplace, through a city which is waking up after a good night´s sleep.

15 minutes later than I could have, I arrive at the Archbishop´s Palace. I find my office, I open the computer and my work day starts.........but first I look out my office window to see if there are new spring flowers growing in the cathedral park, and I open my window to listen to the birds.

 

My kind of colouring book

@brittarnhild

 

Do you know Johanna Basford´s Secret Garden Colouring Book? I know I had heard about it some months ago, but completely forgotten, untill I read an article on facebook today about colouringbooks for geownups, a rebellion agains the digital world. Several Norwegian Publishing Houses are now making colouring books, and they som varmt hvetebrød as we say in Norway, like hot wheat bread/buns. A Norwegian trendspotter say that the colouring books are a combination of mindfulness, meditation, creativity and silence

To keep sane during hard, stressful, busy, challenging periods in my life, I always have a sketch book, and a box with rainbow pencils. I am no artist, I can´t draw actually. But sitting down, playing with the colours, drawing lines, colouring, let my hand find her own way......well, it is my favorite part of the day. I have a very special book which I bought in London a few months ago which is my current art journal. And a few weeks ago I even started a very simple art journal at work, using an old notebook and some old crayons I found when tidying the drawers under my desk.

I remember I used to love colouring books as a child.
Now I have ordered Johanna Basford´s  Secret Garden.

 

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The photos shows a drawing I made in my art journal last night.

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Here is a link to the Norwegian article

and here is Johanna Basford´s book: