Tag: New York City

Travelers

On June 23, 2015

Some people are travelers. They have the desire or need to see and experience as many different places as possible on this vast yet tiny globe that humanity inhabits. I am not one such. While I have traveled to a number of different places, I have made but two great journeys in my life and both of them have been journeys of the heart. The first was when I moved my suitcases across the Hudson River from my birthplace of New Jersey to New York City. There I found the city of my heart and thought I would stay there the rest of my life. My second great journey was across a wider river of water to Stockholm, Sweden because it was there my heart found love.

Many of the people I have met here in Stockholm in the 25 plus years I’ve lived here are the traveller type. While on their journeys around the world they somehow for one reason or another have ended up here in my little corner of the world. And they continue to use this corner as a stepping off place from which to continue to explore the other places they are curious about. But this little corner of mine has become, for me, more like the last stop on the bus line. Not really a final destination but just the last stop, from which the bus goes no further.

Now this doesn’t mean that I haven’t been anywhere except Budd Lake, NJ or New York City or Stockholm. I have travelled a bit in my life. I’ve been to Washington DC to visit with my roommate Roz and again to various towns in Maine to see her there too. I spent a great month in California when I visited another of my roommates, Lynne. We spent hours building up our tans round her swimming pool, then happy hour at the local Mexican restaurants drinking frozen margaritas. Together we traveled the coast road to San Francisco and went to the San Diego Zoo to see the Kuala bears. Greensboro, North Carolina is another place I’ve been to when I drove down there with three friends in a noisy Volkswagen bus to visit one more former roommate. On the way we stopped in a few local southern diners who’s customers didn’t seem to look too fondly on the four of us in our ratty bell-bottomed jeans and long, below-shoulder length hair (the two guys included). I’ve been to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York to visit my friends Tom and Wally at their 100-year-plus house and they drove me on country roads up and down the very green hills. I took the train to Washington DC to visit my New York City friend Nancy after she moved there. And I saw the sights of Philadelphia when I went there to stay with Linda who I had gotten to know here in Sweden. I took the train down to the south of Sweden to visit Gerd at her house near Trelleborg. I’ve been to Denver, Colorado where one of my besties from Pratt Art school, Irene, lived with her husband. They took me up to walk amid the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been to Florida a few times. First to Hollywood, where my grandmother lived and later to Miami where my former Philadelphia pal, Linda, had relocated to. I went there with my husband and son and while there we, of course, couldn’t avoid taking in the sights of Disney World, Sea World and all the other theme parks in Orlando. I’ve even been to Heidleburg Germany when Håkan and I drove down there to visit my cousin Devorah and her husband and kids who were living there.

So I have traveled around a bit. But if you look to see what the common denominator has been for all these trips it wasn’t because I wanted to see interesting places in the world. It was because I had people I knew in those places. The reason I traveled to those places was because I wanted to see the people not the scenery. I saw a bit of scenery on the side but it was the chance to once again meet the people I knew that enticed me enough to go to the trouble of packing my bags and going out on the road. Without the people, and the stories we shared, the places are just places. And I have to admit that in regard to places, the place I love the best is often one I find in my own home, where I can sit on the sofa, with my shoes off. And just relax with a good book. That’s really the only traveling I need.

Summertime

By Hilarie

On July 8, 2013

In Life, Stavsnäs

I took a walk this morning – down the road to the postboxes to pick up our morning newspaper. It was a pleasant, sunny 18 degrees C but the very brisk north wind made if feel cooler. On my way back to the house I took a short detour down to the lake. It was still early so there was no one there – I had the whole beach to myself. I waded out into the water, to just above my knees and stood there watching the fish swimming around my feet.

I like standing there in the chilly water. It makes my arthritic joints feel better. Small wind-driven wavelets lapped about my knees and I listened to the tree leaves rustling in the breeze, in waves of sound, punctuated by the cries of the various bird species that live here in our neck of the woods. This is summer. This is what vacation means to me. I stayed there for quite awhile.

Sometimes as we drive to the store from our house, we pass joggers. There they are, running along our country road with their ears stuffed with earplugs attached to their smart phones. I have no idea what they are listening to. Aside from being mildly dangerous – they can’t hear cars coming from behind them – I can not understand why they would choose to cut themselves off from the all the sounds of Nature around them. I can’t imagine how anything coming over the wire could possibly beat that.

I was never much of a nature-lover back in my previous life, back in New York City. And even when I first moved to Stockholm, I preferred the city to the country. But now I can sit back, on my deck, listening to the birds and the sounds the trees make in the breeze and just feel good. I like looking at the green color of the trees as they are silhouetted against the bright blue Swedish sky and think what a beautiful color combination that is. Whoever designed that combination should be very proud of themselves. Professor Buckley, the color teacher at Pratt, certainly would think so.

Its sooooo green

By Hilarie

On July 29, 2012

In Family, Life, Stavsnäs

It was almost 20 years ago when we first came out here to Stavsnäs, the country property my husband’s parents first bought, back in the early 50s.

The old sofa

One of the many things we found out here was a teak, outdoor sofa that was very much in need of love. One of the first summers here, in between my many other duties as a mother of a young child, I spent a lot of hours sanding and oiling that sofa. For many years now, it has been one of the main pieces of outdoor furniture we have out here. We would store it indoors during the winter and take it out again when we came out here the following spring. There it would be, first on the deck outside our little house and for the past 4 years on the deck outside the new big house. Each year it would sit, soaking up the rain and drying out in the sun and one year, when we didn’t get to put it inside, even withstanding the snow. But all those years of use had taken their toll. Our once lovely bench had turned grey and rough and no longer so pleasant to sit on. So, yestarday, I decided to spend some time fixing it up again. It didn’t take as much sanding as it did 20 some-odd years ago but the oiling took longer since the oil I had was old and needed to be applied very carefully. Now, it can once again sit on the deck, dark and smooth and warm to the touch.

It’s hard to believe that so much time has gone by since I first came out here – to the Swedish countryside. I have spent many hours sitting on that bench looking out at the growing things on our property. I believe my husband often felt guilty dragging his New York City wife out of the city, first on his sailboat and then later out to his childhood’s summer paradise. Those early years, on the sailboat, I kept up my standards. My nails were polished, I wore eye makeup and I didn’t go anywhere without my earrings. I have to admit that walking through spider webs when going ashore to tie up the boat was icky but I did it. Once the boat was anchored, I managed to crouch down on the rock cliffs next to the little grill we set up to grill on. Then, when Bevin came along, we switched from the boating life to livet på landet. There we spent our summers, in 25 square meters of house – with an outhouse to use instead of indoor plumbing. I washed dishes, outside, next to the house wall, sometimes in the sunshine and often in the rain. Wearing my first pair of green rubber boots, I used my new weed-wacker to force some semblance of civilization onto the growing things surrounding us. When the poop buckets got filled and needed to be switched I did that too. And when we were forced to compost our own poop, Håkan bought and assembled a latrine compost container and I emptied 6 poop barrels into it, garbed in old clothes, rubber boots and plastic gloves. I then washed out the empty barrels with the garden hose and left them to dry on the lawn in the sun. By now, I hardly even complain about it anymore, though of course it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t complain a little bit. I still need to go back once a week to the city, to our apartment, to wash clothes, to check mail and to wash my hair in a shower that the wind doesn’t blow through and where the warm water lasts long enough.

I sit on my bench and I look up at the tall tree tops, the birches, the oak, and the pines – I watch the way the leaves move in the wind. I listen to the sound they make as they move. I watch the birds as they fly by or as they peck at the ground, hopping around. Sometimes a deer comes by. I watch the few flowers we have planted as they open to the sun. My three ölandstok bushes have burst out into bloom just last week and that gives me pleasure to look at them. Proud that I planted them and glad that they still are alive.

Long ago, before Sweden, I was visiting my friend Tom and his wife Wally up at their country house in the Catskills. Their idea of a fun thing to do on a sunny afternoon was to pile everyone into their minivan – themselves in the front and me and the dogs on the back seat and then drive around on the county roads up there in the Catskill Mountains. Up and down and around we drove. Passing unkempt houses with 3 or 4 broken down cars on the front lawn. Sometimes small, quiet villages too. Looking down into deep valleys and up to tall tree covered mountains. The goal I think was to get to some cafe or something, eventually. After about two or three hours of this, sitting in the back, fighting for seat space with the dogs, I just had to complain. I asked them in the front seat, for certainly the upteenth time, “When are we going to get there?” meaning the cafe. And when they turned to me and asked me, “Whats the matter? Aren’t you enjoying this – looking out at the nature?” My response to that was, ” Weeeeell, its OK, but its just soooo green!” To this day, they have never let me forget that.

So now as I sit on my newly oiled bench, I look out at all the green around me. I have no makeup on. My fingernails are cut short and unpolished. I have a very unflattering pair of sweatpants on, a black tank top and a red cotton shirt with paint splashes on it and my feet are filthy. The city seems so far away. I hear its call but dimly. The wish to have nice shoes on and be dressed in a great summer dress, to have my face on and earrings too, while I walk along city streets looking in all the shop windows, is still there. There is definitely a part of me that misses that life. Perhaps the fact that as I walk along the city streets I’m now surrounded by a lot of 20- and 30-something girls who look so great in their summer clothes and I am now a 60-something old lady (though people tell me, a very well preserved 60-something) who just can’t compete with all those lovely young things, makes me less willing to want to be there.

With love

So now I’m content for the moment to sit on my 30-year-old rejuvenated bench and watch the eternally old and eternally new, ever changing face of Nature surrounding me.

While deep down inside me is still that memory of my New York-self, I no longer mind just sitting and looking out at all that green.

Another year older

By Hilarie

On December 26, 2009

In Uncategorized

A new year is fast approaching. That’s a good thing, I guess. A new beginning, new resolutions, a new start. All good things. It also means a new notch on our belt, another year older. I’m still not sure how I feel about that. Here’s something I wrote almost 7 years ago but being that its soon the eve of a new year I thought it appropriate to put it up on my blog now. Something to think about as we cross over that demarcation line that causes 2009 to change over to 2010. Happy New Year everyone!

I feel the need to rant a little. I want to start off by making something very clear – this whole thing about aging – I don’t like it, not one bit.

I haven’t been feeling so good lately. When I wake up in the morning, just getting my feet over the edge of the bed down to the floor takes an effort. And then I have to stand up! What a job! Walking’s OK, once I manage to bend down to buckle my shoes. I keep hoping that I don’t have to go uphill though. That’s a real bother! When I ride a bus, I generally get up and give my seat to any white haired old lady when there are no seats left. I figure that I have to set a good example for my 12-year-old son. But, I don’t know, they must have done something to those bus seats when I wasn’t looking because they are so hard to get up out of!