She’s 85 and she’s alive! The party we had for Tante Ruth was a HUGE success – and she was the last to leave after three hours of non-stop laughing. (We thought she would just stay ten minutes but she was having so much fun she just kept going and going.) Her sisters were in absolute shock over her behavior and how alive and happy she seemed. We had many bright pink paper hearts full of greetings, memories, and love and she was deeply touched by that gesture (Thank you Jesus!). She sat and told story after story about the pranks that Kory and his brothers pulled on her in the years she lived with them in America. She was quite comical in acting out the story of the time Kory hid in her closet until late in the evening when she came in from some meeting. When she opened the closet doors, Kory was standing there with a flashlight on his chin shining up in his face. He nearly scared her to death (and apparently he got in big trouble over that one.) It almost rivaled the time Kory’s brother Henry set a realistic looking toy rat on the top step, tied a string on its tail, hid the string under the carpet and waited for her to walk by, then pulled the string. She has a strong heart or surely she wouldn’t have survived living all those years with those boys. She’s hard of hearing now so towards the end of the evening I yelled across the table and asked her (in Norwegian) if she thought it was a good day today (“fin dag i dag?”). She said “No.” Her sister yelled in her ear and repeated what I asked and then she corrected herself and said “Yes,” but she thought I had asked if she had a headache (which when spoken in Norwegian it does sound similar). We all had a good laugh over that one.
I feel quite satisfied that we had this party for her. And it wasn’t just good for her -- it was good for her sisters too – they got to see her having a good time and now they have this memory of her after she’s gone. I took a little video clip while she was telling some of the stories -- so that’s the Tante Ruth that will live on – not the one that sits alone in her apartment all day, curtains drawn, not answering her door bell or phone, wearing a frightful scowl on her face, and complaining constantly about every little thing wrong with herself and the world at large. We’ll just remember the good times and be thankful even the crabbiest of people can have a happy birthday every now and then – especially if it turns out to be her last one.
I’ve been off school nearly two weeks now so my head was a little fuzzy in deciphering Norwegian today, but I made it through class nonetheless. I had to read aloud the report I wrote about what we did on our vacation. I cheated and had Kory help translate, as I couldn’t say all the important things about the trip with my limited vocabulary. I wanted to be understood, without too much embarrassment. It worked. It was good to be back in class with my pal Vestina and the good teacher Inga. Today’s lesson was a lot about weather again – it’s such a huge part of life here in Norway that they want to be sure we are fluent in all the words to use when complaining about it. (We even learned the word for “complain.”) Today was an “oppholdsvær” day. They use that word to describe a day where nothing is falling from the sky – no rain or snow, but it looks like it might. It literally means “holding up weather” – like the clouds are holding in their moisture. It’s a step in the wrong direction from “overskyet” – which is just overcast skies with no real threat of precipitation. I feel like I’ve stepped into that zone where the Eskimos in Alaska have 26 words to describe snow. It’s something like that here – they are far more descriptive in their weather words than we are in America.
We started the day off singing a song about rain. We’ve already had to memorize a poem about playing in the rain, now we get to sing in the rain, too. They do everything in the rain here and even though they get a lot of rain, they take great consolation in the fact that Bergen always gets more. I was thinking the massive amount of foot and bike traffic going in front of our house was because it was so nice outside all summer, but when it was raining the last few days, there’s wasn’t much of a decrease – people were still out for family bike rides, just all dressed in their raingear and it was POURING down rain (“pøsender regn” in Norwegian). And women were still out doing their power walks – with rain pants and coats on. It’s amazing to me, as I use the rain as an excuse to get inside things done, but some years here I guess no one would ever go outside if they were sitting around waiting for a sunny day. In the Northwest we were raised that if the sun it out, we should be out in it. So when I moved to California to go to college, I didn’t clean my house for a whole year as I kept waiting for a rainy day so I could stay indoors and clean. And then it dawned on me that it wasn’t ever going to rain so I should probably get busy. It will be the opposite here - I may need to go buy some rain pants. But it didn’t rain today and by all accounts – it was a “fin dag i dag”.
I feel quite satisfied that we had this party for her. And it wasn’t just good for her -- it was good for her sisters too – they got to see her having a good time and now they have this memory of her after she’s gone. I took a little video clip while she was telling some of the stories -- so that’s the Tante Ruth that will live on – not the one that sits alone in her apartment all day, curtains drawn, not answering her door bell or phone, wearing a frightful scowl on her face, and complaining constantly about every little thing wrong with herself and the world at large. We’ll just remember the good times and be thankful even the crabbiest of people can have a happy birthday every now and then – especially if it turns out to be her last one.
I’ve been off school nearly two weeks now so my head was a little fuzzy in deciphering Norwegian today, but I made it through class nonetheless. I had to read aloud the report I wrote about what we did on our vacation. I cheated and had Kory help translate, as I couldn’t say all the important things about the trip with my limited vocabulary. I wanted to be understood, without too much embarrassment. It worked. It was good to be back in class with my pal Vestina and the good teacher Inga. Today’s lesson was a lot about weather again – it’s such a huge part of life here in Norway that they want to be sure we are fluent in all the words to use when complaining about it. (We even learned the word for “complain.”) Today was an “oppholdsvær” day. They use that word to describe a day where nothing is falling from the sky – no rain or snow, but it looks like it might. It literally means “holding up weather” – like the clouds are holding in their moisture. It’s a step in the wrong direction from “overskyet” – which is just overcast skies with no real threat of precipitation. I feel like I’ve stepped into that zone where the Eskimos in Alaska have 26 words to describe snow. It’s something like that here – they are far more descriptive in their weather words than we are in America.
We started the day off singing a song about rain. We’ve already had to memorize a poem about playing in the rain, now we get to sing in the rain, too. They do everything in the rain here and even though they get a lot of rain, they take great consolation in the fact that Bergen always gets more. I was thinking the massive amount of foot and bike traffic going in front of our house was because it was so nice outside all summer, but when it was raining the last few days, there’s wasn’t much of a decrease – people were still out for family bike rides, just all dressed in their raingear and it was POURING down rain (“pøsender regn” in Norwegian). And women were still out doing their power walks – with rain pants and coats on. It’s amazing to me, as I use the rain as an excuse to get inside things done, but some years here I guess no one would ever go outside if they were sitting around waiting for a sunny day. In the Northwest we were raised that if the sun it out, we should be out in it. So when I moved to California to go to college, I didn’t clean my house for a whole year as I kept waiting for a rainy day so I could stay indoors and clean. And then it dawned on me that it wasn’t ever going to rain so I should probably get busy. It will be the opposite here - I may need to go buy some rain pants. But it didn’t rain today and by all accounts – it was a “fin dag i dag”.
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