Sunday Dinners

Kaleb had me convinced this morning that it snowed last night. It was certainly cold enough for that and when I looked out and saw a layer of white over everything, I believed him. Turns out it was just a very heavy frost. How ironic it would have been to have a summer-like day end in snowfall. It was cold today but still a lovely day to be outside, so we walked to Agape Kirke this morning and back home again. We were missed at church (we haven’t been there for three weeks), so that was nice to hear. The sermon was excellent, as always, and the people there are very friendly. It’s so good to feel like we have a church family no matter where in the world we go. The fact we all love God is the common bond, despite how different we are otherwise. I like that.

I came home and started preparing dinner for our guests this evening. I can’t let one weekend go without having someone over, so tonight was the night for hospitality. We invited cousin Odd’s second cousin, Arne and his wife Hilde for dinner. We met them over ten years ago when we first started coming to Norway as they are also Odd and Turid’s neighbors. We’ve sat out on Odd’s balcony many summer nights, wrapped up in blankets, drinking wine and talking until the wee hours of the morning. Two of Arne and Hilde’s kids have been very good to Kaleb over the years as well. When Kaleb was younger, their daughter would take him for long walks in the stroller, and when he was a little older, their son would kick around a soccer ball with him endlessly. Sometimes it seemed Kaleb spent more time at their house than Odd and Turid’s when we came for a visit. It was nice to finally have a chance to invite them over for a meal. And once I learned that Hilde grew up and is good friends with The Good Teacher Inga, I thought it would be fun to invite Inga and her husband for dinner as well. So it was a very entertaining evening with these two old girlfriends and their husbands sitting around our dining room table chatting about their children, their childhood and the happenings in the world today. Hilde and Inga were best friends in school and also neighbors in their childhood, as their houses shared a common wall in the 4-plex where they both grew up.

Inga’s husband, Patrick, is from Ireland, and it is a little ironic that he doesn’t speak much Norwegian, when she is a Norwegian teacher! So a good part of the conversation tonight was in English, which I enjoyed very much. Patrick is a carpenter, so he and Kory had something in common, and Patrick, as we learned tonight, works for the Ålesund Kommune and his boss is the guy Kory’s been in contact with that just arranged the purchase of The Sinking Houses. Kory asked Patrick to put in a good word for us with his boss so hopefully we can continue to keep living here. And Arne, the other guy here for dinner, works for the insurance company that just sold The Sinking Houses to Ålesund Kommune, so it was a very fun night as we all told our stories of our experiences with the houses where we live. Small town stuff.

Having guests on Sunday makes the most sense on one hand, because there isn’t much else to do on Sunday’s around here so visiting with friends is a good option. But on the other hand, it’s a bit stressful since no grocery stores are open and everything required to make the meal must be in the house before 8pm Saturday night when the last store closes. Planning is the key because if I wait until 8pm Saturday night to buy something, chances are pretty good the store is already out of it. I planned to make a very yummy salad using butter lettuce (something very hard to find in these parts). I bought three heads of lettuce on Friday, but had no room to store them in the frig, so I set them out in the garage and wrapped them up so they wouldn’t freeze. It was so cold last night that they froze solid anyway. It feels nearly disastrous when there are no options to go to the store and re-buy anything and the menu has to be altered. After soaking the lettuce in warm water I was able to salvage some of it so I went ahead with the salad I had planned and just made them very small, like a genuine French restaurant would serve. But I’ve had that situation before with not having all the items I needed for something I planned to make on Sunday, and had to go begging from the neighbors to borrow this or that. So much for independence. Maybe keeping things closed on Sunday is about more than just a day of rest, maybe it’s also part of Norway’s socialistic planning and how they demonstrate best that we all need each other and must work together for a common goal: Sunday dinners.