There's an obscure Norwegian movie called "The Bothersome Man". The film is set mostly in black and white, and it's dreary and boring, for most of the time. At a certain point, the Bothersome Man finds himself digging a tunnel up into a brightly lit, warm, colourful house, where there are flowers, children laughing, and cakes. He grabs some cake and then gets pulled back down into the monochrome reality of his life and sent to an arctic-looking wilderness.
I've been dreaming about moving back to the country. I imagine a house filled up with movement: a dog, a cat, people around, a wood stove that I can cook on, things lying around the way they tend to do in country houses. I'm staring into what I hope is a creative space and I realized I'm looking at some seashells on my window sill. I picked them up somewhere, years ago, probably four different places. The spiral shapes are compelling, inviting me to go down that windy memory lane to remember where I picked them up off the warm sand. But more than that, they're also telling me they don't belong here. Here is inside, on a window sill, in a city a thousand miles from the sea. They bring me peace, though.
A little further down the windowsill are some small glass jars I've filled with herbs: coltsfoot and alcohol; coltsfoot and honey; spring herbs and alcohol. I was going to make spring bitters. I was going to make cough syrup. I'm channelling my little house at the edge of the forest: my cat, my wild herbs, my chickens and their brown eggs with orange yolks. We do own a house in the forest, but we only go there in the summertime so I can't keep chickens or grow a garden. And I don't even want to: my son and my lovely grandchildren are in Los Angeles, so am I going to live a dreamy witch life and never travel? Hide inside my wild herbs and my snail shells? I'd be that crusty old weird granny they hardly ever see: instead I'm the funny bright Granny who reads books and does squats.
In front of the window sill is a beautiful wooden high chair that my husband crafted 34 years ago. My third son sat in that chair for hours, soaking up the sights and sounds of the medieval tower we lived in. The colours on the tablecloth; the sounds of our voices; the sounds of the people in the village below; the smell of the food we cooked and ate; the sounds of his brothers arguing and playing. Then his younger brother observed farm life from it: food being prepared; wine being poured; older brothers running around; the cat on the chair. Then the youngest brother of all sat in that same chair in a suburban house on a street that had a rural-sounding name. When he was still a toddler we bought an old abandoned shepherd's house that he learned to love, and he learned to love being in the countryside and sleeping in the quiet, and walking in the woods.
Is it the quiet I'm craving? It's partly a psychic quiet, where you're not pushed up together with so many thousands of souls. You look at the sky, or the moon, and you can actually see them. You feel the earth. But I'm not seeking quiet. I'm seeking comfort, and a certain type of joy that I feel when my feet are hitting dirt or rocks instead of cement and asphalt. I'm seeking that colorful room, there where there's a woodstove that I can cook on, and flowers from the garden, and warm cakes, and children laughing, and stars in the sky, and pancakes in the morning, and a cat, and a dog, and ducks, and cups of tea, and a necklace made of wooden beads, and petals, and snails, and I know I'm home.
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