arctic dreaming

 

Midsummer.  I ride my bike after supper up County Hwy S. The peonies are past their bloom, now,
and shatter petals on the top of the woodstove when I try to take them out to the compost heap.  I'm still sucked in to the picture archive of N. Sweden. The archive is from 1929, not that many years ago, but it looks like something from a completely different era.  I can't explain, even to myself, why this is so rich and affecting.

I can't read a word of it, and yet there is the stark reality, not sad, not joyous.  It just seems true,
and full of mystery. Black kettles hang over smoky fires in tents with warp weighted loom woven Sami grene weaves on the walls in the background. A reindeer pelt moults against the head of the woman milking it; a midwife sits complacently beside the bed of the new mother. On the pillow next to her is the small, dark head of the newborn. It does and doesn't seem like a miracle.

Storehouses, draped with garlands of drying animal pelts, vast forest covered hills, cut by wide, fast Arctic rivers, landscape that dwarfs the lives of humans and animals. No fences. Boats and sleds, few roads.  I don't want to be there, but I'm hovering there in my imagination.