Soap and tears and farewells and anniversaries and hugs and meditation.

Soap leaf with glitter and lavender, made by Ronja.

This week:
Ronja played a concert in an old peoples home.

 

We arrived, drenched in sweat, 20 minutes late, which apparently wasn´t a problem, because the audience needed some time to take their seats, as well. Or maybe, they were just happy to have us, so they didn´t mind. I don´t know. I listened to Ronja playing her "I like the flowers" on her harp,  listened to the teenage girls from her harp class playing "River flows in you", and watched the old ladies (95 % of the audience was female). I watched the ones awake, and the ones asleep, and I pondered about what stories they´d have to tell, how they might have looked and lived and loved, just a couple of years ago, and how they feel about being in this place. 

I talked to a few of them, later, after the concert, but they wanted to hear to much from me instead of telling their stories. They wanted to hear about my twins and about how life with four children is, and why we chose the harp, so they couldn´t tell me their stories. 

Guess I need to come back- time will come, and I´ll walk in their shoes, so I need to be prepared.

It was our tenth wedding anniversary this week. 

And this is cherry juice. 100% no alcohol.

 Though, we don´t really believe in anniveraries. See, when we got married, we had allready lived together for a year, and had been a couple for 5 years. We knew it was coming, anyway, so we took the party, and it was quite a cool party, but, well, we had so many moments in our relationship that were a lot more important.

Talking about our university options on the phone, I still remember sitting on my heating in my one-room flat, and deciding we wanted to do it together. The first kiss in the tent, after I really had worked on him for quite a while. Being scared he´d get crushed stagediving on a Metallica concert. Stage diving myself, to impress him. Him cycling 50 kilometres to come help me burry my guinnea pig. Hiking through Norway, running out of food, sleeping at the Stockholm trainstation, and when I got really, really tired, he carried me on his back. Painting the kitchen of our first flat in pink, wearing nothing but underwear, and in one of the breaks, he asked me if I wanted to go to the doctor, because he figured I could be pregnant. Which I was. Ah, it´s so great to have a mathematician as a friend!

So, getting married wasn´t really a big deal. I like carrying his name. But other than that, it´s no more than a piece of paper we don´t really need.
But still, ten years is something to be proud of, so we opened a bottle of fine cherry juice.

Did you know you could add temporary tattoos to soap?

Eva and Ronja found out yesterday.
Needless to say what they spent most of the week with...

Yesterday one of our neighbours made the transition from "Eva´s piano teacher" to "my friend" when she came here, and we talked music and books for a while, and she finally helped me figuring out the missing chord to Brahm´s Waltz. In the beginning, when she came into our house, I tended to feel embarressed, because our floor looked like this:

That was before she told me I should take a photo of this scenery, because it looks like art, and we began making up stories to it. Oh, and that was before I saw her house :) She´s such a cool lady!

And the tears, and hugs, and farewells?
Well, it was Eva´s last day of primary school today.
I don´t know if leaving primary school is a common occasion for tears. As you can probably imagine after what I just stated, I didn´t cry at my own wedding.
But I cried today. So did Eva, and nearly everyone in her class, and her teachers, and even mums whose children are just firstgraders, so they still have another three years on this school. And it´s not like I am leaving this school, only Eva is.
But who said crying is rational?
The only thing to make it plausible is how we identify with this school. It has been second home for our kid´s four four years now, and it has become second home for most of us moms, too. The big majority of my friends is, at least somehow, connected to this school. So it actually isn´t this school. It´s our school.
And it felt very human, and very warm and fuzzy, to hug the mom sitting next to me, and to hug a mom from another class, and to hug crying first graders, and to hug my daughter and her best friend, and tell them to treasure this feeling, because it is very unique in a lifetime, and very human.
And to take them home and cook a huge pot of spagetti bolognese and send them off to the swimming pool.

I love being alive.

I hardly listen to german music. As you can probably guess, this was Eva´s farewell song today. What I found most amazing about it, apart from the fact it´s a total tear-drawer, if you understand the german lyrics and are in the right mood, is, that it´s sung by this particular artist.
See, back then, when I finished primary school, I remember how I went home to hide in my room, crying. And under my blanket, I listened to my brand new tape from this artist. That´s pretty cool, I think.

And if this post was too long and incoherent to follow, well, that´s okay.