The knitter apprentice and her fourth piece

I´m very thankful for that Erika and Anna, the master knitters of Sweden and England respectively, have inspired me to take up this fine needle work. Although it tires me out at periods, it s the only creative outlet I have, and for short bursts it can even make me forget how dire my situation is, but I won´t go in to that again today.

Last thing to finnish is my first cardigan. Most of it I made when we were in Denmark, but when I made an attempt at assembling the pieces back home I had to take up and re-do the front bits not just once, but about 4 times before they fitted on properly. I still think its a bit on the short side, but hope I can strech it out a little after I wash it.

I have a dream, just one

Its been a strain to be me the last few days. Not so much because my ME has been treating me worse than usual, but because I get bouts of mental distress that get deeper than I can handle at times. I was listening to Sommar on the P1 radio today, and don´t know why I forced myself to listen to the whole 1 1/2 hour program of one of the hosts in end of june, Fredrik Härén. He went on and on about how you can realize your dreams if you want to, and that its just to get out and take those steps and it will all come to you. Its been alot of that lately. The man who´s car got hit by a moose and was a write off, only for him to win a brand new Volvo two weeks later. Sports profiles who overcome injuries against all odds, or those that don´t and then discover masses of meaning in life through raising a family of something instead.

Well I have a dream, and its just to get well. Moving to China, have babies, apply for a meaningful job or run a marathon are all just luxuries I long ago stopped dreaming I will ever experience. I´m sick of hearing the "you can be anything you want" bollox. I´m not sitting here because of lack of vision. I want to live with Joe, study development politics and travel, and if was just well that would be exactly what I would be doing. I can´t be anything I want, so stuff the cheery attitude where the sun don´t shine.

Summary and anniversary

So one can think that we did nothing but rummage through rubbish and sanitize old furniture during the time we were in Denmark this time around. Well my mum did, cuz she is like I used to be, not able to relax and always have to have something to do. Even tanning is sort of like a forced activity when u look at her. But I spent alot of time in the hammock (what should I name her?), reading, knitting and listening to podcasts.


Recommendation of the month is "The secret history" by Donna Tartt. I can honestly not say why I liked it so much, maybe because I had friends in uni who also were students of the classics and they too belonged to a slightly different, paralell world that the rest of us didn´t grasp, when they dove in to discussions of Homer, Hesiod, details of Spartan society or ancient greek pronounciation. This tale of a bunsh of spoiled american college students, escalating in to various substance abuse actually even makes me want to give Dante another go.





Gran finally gave in and tried it

Tranekaer castle mill

Mum couldn´t relax and brought home bagfulls of weaving yarn and initiated a 3 day-sanitizing process

Now I didn´t feel too crap as long as I didn´t attempt any longer ventures than down the beach (water was surprisingly warm). On a few occasions we went to larger towns like Rudköping and Svendborg, something that would have been impossible without me being pushed around in a wheelchair. And even then I spent the following 24 hours in near unconciousness when we got back. This scenario seeming to have become the established order of things, and then we´re still talking about the "good" periods.
I celebrated my first anniversary as an ME sufferer on the 18th of july. I dunno how to describe what it feels like anymore. Thanks to various pills I guess I can focus on the few things I can do and in short bursts forget about the bigger picture. While in Denmark I can take being on public display. People stare, and I can honestly not say that I wouldn´t have stared at a woman in dreadlocks being pushed around by her 76-year old grandma, wondering what the heck is wrong with her. But when at home it happens that I need to come along to the local shopping centre, having my mum wheel me around like a packet in a shopping trolley. And then I am terrified that we will meet someone I used to know. What would I say? What would they say? I know I haven´t got anything to be embarassed about, but that is just what I am. I was always the one who never gave up, who could push myself and my body further than anyone else. Now all pushes just make me worse, and when I´m really tired I even look like I´m sporting a bit of a mental disabillity too, only a bit of drooling that´s missing. I prefer to stay at home. This re-defining of self is a work in progress I guess, and maybe I will relax about it in a few years.


A snapshot looking more or less normal, the ferry back to Sweden

My deepest roots to date

So I´m not done waffling about my family and our past whereabouts just yet. There is loads left to write, but lucky for whoever stumbles on this blog my body just can´t take that amount of sitting in front of the computer.

On the day I rummaged through binbags, drawers and closets in the cat-infested house I came across a small wooden box behind a load of linnen in a sealed wardrobe. Thanks to that bundles of newspapers, furniture and boxes had barricaded the doors probably more than a decade ago, nothing smelled worse than had it lied in a sealed environment in any old house. I was looking through alot of things just then so I just opened the box absentmindedly and out fell a few loose sheets of paper. I noticed that the handwriting looked very old, like from those days when you got a smack over the fingers at shcool if you didn´t make the arches of the script connect properly, so I gathered the sheets and brought them down with me for further inspection back at our house at Hou.

My skill at deciffering old calligraphic texts is not helped by that if was in Danish, but when gran later had a read through some of them she noted the date 1890 (the oldest was 1880), and after a bit of thinking we figured out that most of the letters were written by my grans grandmother Frederikke Jespersen, later Frederikke Pedersen, who after she married Mads lived in a section of a rented house in Trenekaer, while he worked with laying down a new roof on Tranekaer castle. She mostly wrote to her mother at "Olgas" in Lohals, or her sister Caroline who never married and died before she turned 30 (how will I find out why? was she ill?). There is never any mention about Frederikkes father, the sailor, and we can then guess that he might have passed away already in the 1890´s.

The letters give a good picture of what everyday existence on the island was like. Life in Tranekaer didn´t seem too easy and Frederikke often thanks for the milk, cheese, eggs (which cost as much as 5 öre a piece!) and vegetables she gets sent from "Olga´s" abundant gardens. Some letters are replies from the sister Line, and she always asks about the children Olga (the one that later named the house), little Carl (my great grandfather) and baby Gugge (or Gustaf who later died in syfilis and was sent home from his gardening shool in a led casket, never to be mentioned among people again).

Frederikke´s handwriting is rather hard to make out, leaving alot of the letters for gran to ponder upon. I´m rather curious and excited to learn more of what they say, as this is the oldest signs of life of my faily yet


The house where Frederikke´s young family lived before they moved to Lohals

Tranekaer castle where Mads worked on the roof

Kunta Kinte vs. Billy the bookshelf

I´ve always found it quite exciting with antiques, and when I was little I would call them "old and nice" (gammal fin), prefering grans auction-house catalouges before comics. And it is a special feeling to know from when and where an object comes. Bringing it to life by using the clues and filling in the gaps with a good portion of imagination. I´m lucky that my gran shares the same interest and never throws anything of the slightest antique value away. I much prefer to eat with cutlery with the initials of my great granparents, or use the handwoven curtains with the monogram of a great aunt rather than buy massproduced IKEA stuff that comes together once and then never can be altered again.

In the mid 1800´s my grans great grandfather was a sailor in the East India trading company and he would spend long periods away at sea. His family lived in the house we call "Olga´s" (see photo in previos post), in the little village of Lohals on the island of Langeland. Now Lohals harbour was far too small to house any big ocean trading ships, so the nearest port to his home was in Svendborg. From there he would take the stagecoach delivering mail all the way to Lohals. Now imagine what sort of luggage a person staying away for maybe a year at a time would have... right, every crewmember had their own wooden chest, a piece of solid craftmanship.

In those days you simply didn´t throw away a perfectly functional piece just because the original purpouse of manufacture had been served, so when he finally stayed on shore, the chest was treated to a set of legs, a decorating top, and a new lock less likely to need to keep out nosey foreigners. It was integrated in the furniture of "Olga´s" and for a long time it was a central piece of the dining room, storing the good china. When my gran was little it had sort of gone out of fashion, and had been moved to her dad´s, (Carl the master bricklayer) work room, storing all his drawings.

In the 50´s, when my gran had moved to Sweden, she discovered on one of her return visits home that her mother, Kirsten, had painted the inside of it pink! Now I don´t know how long that was on fashion, but sometime between then and my early childhood memories, it was redone in white and was again a centre-piece of the lounge.

On my mums side of the family there is a habit of naming objects and places of special significance, and this chest-turned-cabinet forever holds the name Kunta Kinte after the character in the old TV series Roots. Not because it had seen the world engaging in slave trade or anything, but simply because Kunta Kinte simply symbolized something very old for whoever came up with the name.

These days Kunta Kinte stands in grans room in our house on Hou on Langeland, and I know that eventually it will get to my turn to integrate it in to my life and things.

Saving history

Somehow I´m not exactly the same person returning from Langeland. As ill as ever, sure. But somehow my shadow has grown slightly denser. Now I´m not talking of some significant weight-gain or anything, but a greater sense of belonging, of being the current end to a long line of lives, loves and hardships.

There are four of us in the 6th generation with links to the island, and by the looks of things it seems my sister being the most likely candidate for producing a 7th. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

I´ve always been a sucker for the past, and its blatantly obvious I got this passion from my Danish gran, but its not been until now when I´ve been forced in to a role of sedentism I´ve taken the time to properly listen to the story leading to myself. I´ve scribbled in pads, on napkins and on the back of reciepts, and when I remember to keep it handy, recorded on a dictaphone this past year, and maybe one day it will all boil down to an organized chronicle. But this far it feels like the bottomless well of stories that pour out of my gran, novells in themselves, is an enormous jigsaw of which I still lack an over-arching key.

Thinking of the siv-like memory of my mother I never cease to wonder if she used up the recollection capacity of two generations in one go, but in any case I´m grateful for discovering this before its too late.

My gran Elise Pedersen in the late 1940´s

When we´ve been in front of photo albums back here in Stockholm I´ve always enjoyed hearing of how she moved to Sweden as an 18-year old, working as a maid for the noble af-Ugglas family, how she then already bitten by the dazzling veils of history was allowed to rummage through the manor library among leather-bound volumes from the 17th century, or having the king mother the late Sibylla herself (who never took tea but only tomato juice) hand-sew a large set of towels for my gran´s wedding with my grandad. But it is when we´re in Denmark, when I can lean on the walls that once contained the seasons of life of her stories I feel like my mind fully absorb and nurture them in to pieces of me.



The family farm we call "Olga´s" after my grans aunt who lived and died there


My gran had two older sisters and when their parents and aunt died, they inherited one house each. My grandparents cared for the family farm for as long as the body of my grandad could manage, then they had to let it go. Her oldest sister Ellen and her son Ole stayed on in the house their father built on the island, where the girls grew up. The two of them had very odd perceptions of maintenance and cleanliness, and I dare say suffered all kinds of dilusions, so ending up sharing their humble castle with every stray cat of the region, and their breeding intentions, and soon losing all household priviliges. Now Ole is gone and Ellen has been forced to move down to the care-home of the village. Meaning that the house must be sold and my mum and gran have been rummaging through the enormous health hazard that once was called Janus for the few family heir-looms that hasn´t yet disintigrated under years of treatment to cats claws and excrements.


I wasn´t of much help in that department, but I was up there practicing a bit of the old phenomenology (never thought I´d have any use of that abstract fucker again after finnishing my dissertation), geared out in wellies, hat, torch and plastic gloves. And although the stench was almost unbearable and I came upon two whole dead felines and one rat (the size of a cat) I was able to see glimts of my great grandmother making jam in the kitchen, the family gathered in the living room listening to the 9 pm BBC broadcast during WW2, gran looking out the window of her room or Ellen at work at the loom. Next summer the house will be someone elses, and the bonds to the 5 generations who have called Lohals their home will be almost severed. So I can only proud shoulder the custody of what my family has left and thank for this opportunity to put a face to what can no longer be seen.


My gran´s childhood room

The upstairs hallway

The kitchen










The library

My second home

On the very tip of my summer world

lies the sea behind oceans of Rosehip

Under the thatch time has slowed

mundane pace only visible through binoculars

Squinting I finally begin tracing my island roots

always sharing space with everlasting isopods.