harborshore (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
harborshore) wrote2009-07-05 10:06 pm
harborshore) wrote2009-07-05 10:06 pm
and i made me a house next to the sea
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
graceoftheworld asked me to talk about the cottage in that interview meme, but I had the feeling it might get longer than a comment, so here it is. The cottage itself is nothing special, really--it's tiny and red, like Swedish cottages are wont to be (as
absenteye calls them, they're "little red cottages of Swedishness"). We have a main cottage and an even tinier guest cottage where me and my siblings usually sleep. Right now, it's basically mine, because none of my siblings are in the country.What is special is the location. Our land is part of a nature preserves, which means the amount of buildings are limited by law (as are the modifications allowed to be made to existing buildings), the shore can't be built on, and the forests are full of rare flowers and orchids.
Here, have a sunset--the picture isn't mine, I don't have access to the family picture folder while I'm out here (they're on the main computer at home), but yeah, it looks like this. Once, in August, the first summer we had the cottage, I went down to the beach with my sister and a friend of ours from Denmark, and we went skinny-dipping under the full moon. The air was warm, the water was warm enough, and the night looked like this.
It's hard to explain what it means to me that we have this now, that I can come out here. I lived in the archipelago for nine years when I was a kid, and I can't describe how beautiful it is except by saying things like "paradise" and "stunning" and "too beautiful to really exist." And it sounds ridiculous, I know that, it sounds like I'm exaggerating and it sounds dumb, but it's nature that has been preserved, really, it's having the ocean right there, it's the way everything, everything is blooming right now. But it's also the way the wind never stops blowing, the way it gets so dark here in the winter (there are no streetlights), the way the ocean is both beautiful and terrifying.
Sometimes, for instance (a lot of the time), it looks more like this:
And I love that too. You have to wear woolen sweaters, then, if you want to sit on the cliffs and watch the sea. I do, I even walk down there when it's snowy and icy and the island feels both dangerous and unfriendly. The aforementioned lack of streetlights mean that after five, in the winter, you're very lost without a flashlight.
I spent the day planting flowers and digging. I suspect that, too, is part of the appeal, the way I get to move and move and not think, out here. I go biking and jump into the really cold ocean when I get too hot to continue. Or, like this morning, I go biking when it's cold and rainy and get into the water to feel warmer, almost.
So that's it, my little cottage at the end of the world. There's a lot of world still out here, there are kids running around and cats and deer (they eat the flower buds, if you're not careful) and horses, but when it's early enough in the morning, the silence feels light and huge. No traffic, no city, no nothing. It makes me feel like I can hear everything that happens, my mother getting out of bed, the birch tree in the forest bending in the wind, my cat sneaking out to wander around the house. That silence, I think, is what I need the most.
no subject
no subject
no subject