Blame February

Everyone says that February is the worst month. I guess it’s a good thing it’s also the shortest. But given what this short month has been like so far, I have to agree: February is nobody’s favorite, and definitely not mine.

This is the fourth month there’s been snow on the ground, and apparently we have three to go. Three more months. Three. Before I can smell flowers, see some green grass, walk around in normal footware? Before I can fly around on my bike again? I have to believe the melt will happen in stages, but still – the prospect of even more winter isn’t very appealing. To be fair, it’s getting lighter, too. But that apparently doesn’t make it warmer. 

Weather is the least noxious of February’s ‘gifts’.

I had my first real serious bout of illness this month. In retrospect, I could have probably been more careful and not travelled around so much, and rested more, and covered my face while out in the cold sea air of Vaasa. But I came down with bronchitis. I’ll reserve my praise for the Finnish medical care system for a post where I am not so determined to complain. But being sick and alone in a foreign country has got to be a special circle of Dante’s hell. Reality shifts when you’re disoriented, feverish and cut off from usual points of reference. You focus on survival: how to get to the bus stop without falling over so you can get to the doctor so you can get antibiotics. How and where to kill time downtown while waiting for another bus to take you home. How to get a trip to the store for food in there, especially when you aren’t hungry at all, and when walking around looking at unappetizing food seems like an outing you can forego. These things seem so minor when you’re well, but when you’re feeling like death warmed over, they take on terrifyingly forbidding contours.

And February – and probably illness – has colored my attitude towards Finnish society in general. It’s now in the depths of winter that I see how closed it is. People stay home. They huddle in front of the television (I assume – how would I know?) and have cozy evenings. That is all. I think they also do sports, and they probably go visit relatives, but I look for activities in the papers and don’t see much of anything. Volunteer? Where? It’s not a society where there is a strong tradition of volunteerism, unless you’re a missionary. Society works pretty well, so there isn’t a lot of impetus to improve things. I’ve tried in vain to locate a Transition Town group, for example. I suppose people go to pubs as well, but I haven’t seen a lot of activity on that front, either, and living in an area where bus service stops at 8 p.m., my curfew is early.

But I'm fully aware of my poor attitude. I'm winter-cranky, lonely and trying to slog through. There are signs of beauty out there as well. I'm noticing a lot more birds, and bird song. I love all the suet logs and birdfeeders scattered all over. And the wind-driven, partially evaporated snow creates some amazing natural artwork. February is almost over, and so is my bronchitis. And this post. March, I'm counting on you.

Wishing her a happy birthday

Today, my youngest brother and youngest sister are celebrating their birthday. I am nine years older than they are, so I remember when they were born – how snowy and sunny it was, how excited we were that it was a boy AND a girl, how I got to tell people at school that I was a big sister again. My mother was kind of overwhelmed with two little babies – the youngest of six children – and so my sister and I, as oldest and second-oldest, were each assigned care of one of the babies. She got the boy, and I got the girl.

My new little sister was the most beautiful infant girl you could imagine. She was perfectly proportioned, and she had big brown eyes and the sweetest little smile. And while her twin was curmudgeonly, plump and unsmiling, she more than made up for it with her cute little cries of “Ba! Ba!” and her happy, bouncy movements.

I won’t go into what happened during the intervening years. Partly it would take too long, partly it’s too sad, and partly I don’t want to talk about it here. But my sweet little sister is now an adult who has made too many poor choices, and she’s fallen under the yoke of several addictions.

What do you do with that? Clearly I have no clue. I used to think – naively – that you could “fix” people like her through unconditional love, tough love, providing a safe and calm space, sending them into rehab, sheer force of will, prayer or some combination of those things. I’ve tried them all, and they didn’t work. 

She lived with me for five months while I gave her room and board and she went to community college, her first experience there. I saw her making progress, doing well, having setbacks, overcoming them, eventually turning on me unexpectedly with shocking venom and hatred. She would apologize, promise to do better. She went to AA meetings, and I went with her. But behind my back she was emptying my liquor cabinet and lying about it. Eventually she called me horrible names, told my family what an awful person I was, and made me feel unsafe in my own home. I had reached my limit, and I was forced to turn her out.

I still love her, but I can’t have her near me, and this makes my heart ache. No, it’s more than an ache. She broke my heart, and my heart hasn’t been the same since. I no longer believe that love can conquer all.

I’ve learned that addicts won’t get help until they’re good and ready. It doesn’t matter if they have beautiful, deserving children who need them. It doesn’t matter if they have a loving spouse. It doesn’t matter if their family gives them a choice: either you go into rehab or we will not allow you into our homes again. It doesn’t matter if they have an elderly mother in frail health who’s worried sick about them.

They can’t hear anything except the siren call of whatever drug they crave. And that drug changes their personality, and their health, permanently.

I had a dream last night about my sister. She looked dreadful, like those ads warning you about the dangers of meth. But she was calm and listened to me as I told her about my worries for her, how I loved her, how I wanted my little sister back, the one with the sunny smile and the mischievous giggle. She listened carefully (the way she never does now) and said, “I know, Kathy. I know I’m going to die. But I just can’t help it. Thanks for loving me anyway.”

I hear little snippets about where she is and what she’s doing. None of it is good. And I’m so far away – not that it matters since I’m powerless anyway. But I can still pray for her, and I do. And that’s probably all. 

Happy Birthday, my troubled, beloved sister. Please come back someday.

Pushing through

When I was thinking about what to write about next, it occurred to me that I’m halfway through my (first) year here, since I’m planning on going back to Oregon in June. So a logical title would have been “Over the Hump”. But I’m not ‘over the hump’ in many ways. That title would have implied that ‘the rest is downhill’, ‘everything’s easy from here on out’, etc. etc. Life is much more complicated than that metaphor. Some things got easy for me right away – figuring out public transportation, for example. Other things feel more like I’m tapping around in a dark room, sometimes finding a chair but then realizing no, that’s a table … not a great metaphor, but a more apt one. In particular, I feel this way about Finnish university culture, which is still a great mystery in many ways. And a great epiphany of comprehension of the Finnish language has eluded me so far – which may be one reason why academic culture here still seems  so opaque to me.

So ‘pushing through’ doesn’t imply success or failure, difficulty or ease – just movement forward, sometimes impeded by what’s surrounding me. At least I hope it’s forward. And it is in terms of time, in any case.

One of the biggest personal ‘push-through’s’ was Christmas. I stressed about it so much I almost made myself sick. Would I have enough money to get my daughter over to Switzerland? Would I then have enough money to get myself there? And to feed us while there? Would my son be OK with having us so close in for several days? What about tree/decorations/gifts? Thanks to some serious austerity, I was able to buy the plane tickets and to have enough money for us to have one nice lunch at a fondue restaurant (although as a kind of cosmic joke, the waiter came running after us after we left – he had mixed up our bills and ours was higher than the one I had just paid – so I had to worry about the card going through twice!). My son’s friends allowed us to stay in their apartment as long as we took care of their little kitten, so there was no hotel expense. We did mega-shopping for our meals, and my son paid for it all. He also cooked an elegant Christmas dinner and my daughter did a lot of the baking. My suggestion that we devote ourselves to no stress was welcomed, and we did just that. We walked around Zurich and saw the Chagall stained glass in the Fraumuenster Cathedral, went to the opera (Erik performed in ‘Tosca’), attended midnight service at the Schlieren church, exchanged gifts and sipped coffee, had martinis in the bar atop the tallest building in Zurich, took the tram to the Uetliberg and hiked up to the top for amazing sunset views of the Alps and bad hot cocoa afterwards. I can’t remember hurrying anywhere at any time. Christmas was delightful; it simply flew by too quickly. And it definitely didn’t feel like a ‘push-through’ while I was there. In retrospect, I really didn't need to stress about it quite as much as I did.

Not remembering that I am no longer in my 20s, I planned too much traveling after Christmas. I loved seeing my friends, but didn’t like how tired I felt. I visited a friend I hadn’t seen for ages who now lives on an island in Denmark. It took about three and a half hours to get to her beautiful thatched-roof cottage from Copenhagen. 

We had a terrific, low-key visit, complete with delicious Danish food, marathons of television watching (a Ken Follett movie and “Casino Royale”) and talking about the intervening years, her work as an elections observer in the Ukraine, why the educational system in the US  is in trouble. After that I went to Lund, Sweden, to see dear friends I had missed during my last Swedish sojourn. They too are terrific cooks and made delicious, elaborate meals every evening, including New Year’s Eve. We took a walk through Lund and I reminisced about my student days there. We got to see the official standard measurement for ‘lagom’, just right, which stands on the university property. 

On my way to and from the Helsinki Airport, I visited my friend Nina, and we got to have a longer visit this time. She took me to the National Opera to see ‘La Traviata’. She too is a great cook. It’s a wonder I can wear anything I used to wear last year. Talk about ‘pushing through’!

By the time I got home, I had one day to get ready for the new term’s classes. Probably because I had travelled so much and was so tired, I had a bad case of not wanting to go back to school. And included in that was a deep-seated feeling that I am a charlatan. It’s true, on the eve of every new semester, no matter where I am or what I’m teaching, an inner voice will start sounding in my ear: “I am the world's biggest charlatan. I know nothing. The students will have heard everything I have to say and will stay seated only out of politeness or pity.” But this time it was more pronounced. I had severe trouble sitting down and putting together the next day’s classes. And I felt petulant, a little like a small friend of mine, Frans, who did not feel like saying “thank you” at the dinner table when I was visiting. I knew I had to do it, and I knew I was losing precious time by procrastinating, but I was angry. Angry! Finally I pushed through the anger and petulance and procrastination and put together two imperfect but acceptable first classes. And I didn’t feel the students were staying there out of pity or politeness.

The last ‘push-through’ I’ll talk about is the sun. There is more of it every day. I’m now noticing it, seeing how the dusk lingers longer (past 4 p.m. now) and how the sunlight seems stronger, coming from higher up. So light has pushed through the darkness, and I’m told that by April, I will need to wear a blindfold to be able to sleep. In just two months, the day will be six hours longer. I’m looking forward to it, but I have to say that living through a winter here has shown me how exquisitely beautiful snow and ice can be, and how different nature looks at different times. 

 I no longer think it’s odd that the Inuit have so many words for snow. That being said, I have to admit that I sometimes fantasize about walking through a forest in Oregon taking in that sweet smell of heated fir, wearing a sleeveless shirt, skirt and sandals, feeling sun on my skin. Winter is lovely, but I will be happy when I’ve pushed through it and into the season when I can pack away pounds and pounds of cold-weather gear.

O Little Town of Sandy Hook

It’s probably too soon after the blood bath in my sweet little New England home town to be writing about it intelligently. This post won’t be pretty and it may not even make sense. But I have to get this out.

When I got accepted into grad school at Yale and my husband at the time got a job at General Foods, we were living in California. We consulted a map and realized we should live in Stamford if we wanted to live equidistant from our respective jobs. Once we got to Connecticut, however, we realized that there was no way we would be able to afford to live there. We moved the midpoint farther north until the apex of the triangle reached the edge of Fairfield County. Sandy Hook. What an odd name. I thought it was in New Jersey? We’d hear that a lot over the years.

We were able to afford a house there – near a freeway and somewhat eclectic as they say. It had a rugged wagon wheel chandelier in the cavernous living room, a back yard too steep to do anything with, and a row of hemlock trees (since chopped down) in front of the house – trees that made the livingroom even darker. But it was ours, it was near Lake Zoar, and we loved it. Both of our children were born during the seven years we lived there, in Danbury Hospital.

Coming from Los Angeles, we were charmed by living in New England. There actually were white wooden churches, blazingly beautiful leaves in the fall, maple syrup running in the late winter, and reminders and relics from the Revolutionary War. Sandy Hook was its own entity, but part of Newtown. In the center of Newtown's Main Street, there was a flag pole in the middle of the road. It was considered a traffic hazard, but nobody ever removed that pole. A church nearby had a weathervane that Revolutionary War soldiers had used as target practice. The rooster still had holes in it.

As our children grew, we took them apple picking and sledding. We baptized them both in the Newtown Methodist Church. I joined playgroups with them and took Erik to nursery school two days a week. They rode with me to school – an hour to New Haven each way – and had a wonderful day care provider. They had birthday parties at a local farm. They had an idyllic early childhood – as idyllic as it can be when your parents are stressed from overwork and from straining to be good parents and from letting their marriage suffer – and it was partly because the setting was so peaceful, so self-evidently healthy.

Now all of a sudden, everybody is talking about Sandy Hook. They’re talking about Newtown too (though many are spelling it “Newton”) and about those children.

Those children. My son was one of those children 21 years ago. I had one scary experience with Sandy Hook Elementary School. Erik’s first day there, my first day waiting for him at a bus stop, he didn’t get off the bus. I was a hysterical, sobbing wreck. I got in my car and drove much faster than I should have been allowed to do in such a peaceful, safe town, screeched to a halt in the school parking lot everyone has now seen on television or on Youtube, and ran into the school. There was my precious little boy, sitting on a chair in the hall. I can’t remember now if he had been crying or if he knew that I would come get him. I’m not sure I remember what actually happened, but I think he had gotten on the wrong bus. No matter – we were reunited, and he was safe.

Those children that were shot – did their parents throw themselves in their cars, their hearts in their throats, sobbing, driving too fast down those same roads? How could anyone survive panic like mine multiplied by thousands? Or what came after?

Why would someone come in and shoot them? Alright, he was mentally ill. Like all these shooters are. Who knew that he was? Who let him get his hands on weapons?

And why are there automatic and semi-automatic weapons for sale to the general public anyway? I hear all this talk about how if you make guns illegal, then only criminals will have them. But this is a red herring. It’s not the having of guns that is the problem. It’s the having of guns that can kill 20 small children in the space of minutes. What do we need such weapons for?

We need to ban assault and semi-assault weapons. There is no reason to have them. I can see having a hand gun. I sure feel like carrying one now, once I’m properly instructed on how to use, clean and store it. But come on. What are all these weapons catalogs for? What is this glorification of shooting things in video games and in movies? Why is American society so bloodthirsty?

The well-meaning posts about ‘if only people would love each other’ and ‘if only they let God back in the schools’ – sorry. These don’t address the issue of mental illness. It doesn’t matter how much love and how much God. Mental illness makes people do irrational things. And there are plenty of gun-toting Christians.

The US has to invest money in the treatment of mental illness and it has to ban weapons that aren’t going to be used for hunting or simple self defense. I think it would be in the NRA’s best interest to help make this happen. With freedom comes responsibility. If you’re going to be free to have weapons, then you’d better work to make sure that the weapons don’t get into the hands of the mentally ill.

Sure, there are people who collect semi-automatic and automatic weapons because they are interested in them and not because they plan to kill a lot of people. Why can’t we just sell those and not sell ammunition?

In any event, there has to be a dialog about weapons in the US – preferably one that stops calling names on both sides and works to solve problems cooperatively. But that hasn’t been a strength of ours. I suspect that in a week or so, people will have forgotten Sandy Hook again. There will be hugging of beloved children, and there will be prayers of thanksgiving that family members are safe. But somewhere there is another ticking time bomb, making purchases, making a list and checking it twice.

In the Night Kitchen

Maurice Sendak’s book “In the Night Kitchen” was one of our read-aloud favorites when my children were small. We delighted in the idea of falling into a big bowl of cake batter, of flying a bread plane, and of crowing like a rooster at dawn when the cake was finished. Its message, as I remember it now, is that all kinds of odd things happen during the night, strange and good, before ‘normal’ morning comes again.

There’s something like that here in Finland at the darkest point of the year. It feels like it’s almost always night. There are a few hours of daylight, but it’s subdued and the light is diffuse. (The few times I’ve seen the sun, it’s felt like a holiday or like dawn; it’s been so close to the horizon and all light, no heat.) And there are strange and good things happening in the winter, some of which I’ll talk about here.

But unlike Mickey, I can’t run around Joensuu in the altogether. I now understand more of the reasons behind the huge variety of winter clothing items. I know why people wear mittens rather than gloves and I’ve grown less hostile towards turtlenecks. I realize that knitting is not just something to keep your hands busy while you listen to someone. I understand that scarves are essential, not decorative, and I get why there are so many kinds of boots. Dressing is serious business when the thermometer can reach as low as 35 below. Frostbite is a real concern, not something that only afflicts mountain climbers. I’ve been biking along feeling my thumbs go numb and my thighs sting under three layers of clothing. You have to plan out what to wear so that you not only have the right kind of warm material, but so you also trap air (which provides more warmth) and make sure you don’t sweat so much that you chill. It’s a new process to me, one that takes a lot of time, and one that has made me very crabby on more than one occasion, especially when there’s a social function on the radar that will require getting into and out of these clothes more than once because said function is not in my building at school.

Winter ninja

But I’m over whining about clothing. I’m grateful for every piece I have, whether I brought it over from Oregon, acquired it at a second-hand store, or splurged on the advice of Finnish friends. I don’t even mind that these items spill out all over the place near my front door and take considerable time to get into and out of, because they help me feel more confident about venturing out when it’s really cold. I’ve made a few wardrobe adjustments that make life easier (a fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, wool-silk thermals and a puffy coat), and I’ve decided to store my bike until it’s not as cold and the snow isn’t as deep.

Rather than whine about clothing, let me tell you a little bit about the good things from the “Night Kitchen”. A new network of friends is slowly taking shape, and I keep meeting new people. I can’t possibly replace my friends at home, but I am no longer lonely here. Today, for example, I met a friend at the weaving studio in town and through her met a few more people. We had coffee and shared a shamefully rich chocolate truffle, and I am now scheming about making rag rugs for my summer cabin. My cell phone rings more often now with calls from two particularly close friends and the occasional text message from others. I see that I haven’t scared away my students – several of my classes next term are already nearly full. I’m looking at the pictures of Finnish Facebook friends and seeing all kinds of winter delights – long-distance ice skating on lakes, ice fishing, “spark” riding. Now that I know how to dress, it might actually be fun to be active outdoors rather than coo at the pretty snow from behind triple-glazed windows.

My bus stop

And during the Christmas season, people here create loveliness out of the dark. Shops have luminaria or simple fat candles planted in the snow outside their doors. Light garlands stretch across the streets downtown. The shop windows are bright and inviting. And yesterday I went to a Christmas market. I met   Santa Claus (joulupukki), saw ponies visiting with children dressed like the Michelin man, and envied adults carrying steaming beverages in their mittened hands. It wasn’t terribly crowded, but the wooden stands and the hand-made items for sale made me feel like I had dropped into the 1700s. 

Christmas market, 3 p.m.

I know I’ll crow the first time the sun is still up when I come home from work and rejoice when I can put all the winter gear away, but for now, I’m content to live, and maybe even thrive, in this wintry night kitchen.