Part One
Scenes from a Decade
2011–2021
Part Two
Thoughts After a Visit to Denmark
Early September, 2021
I have a friend, a former gymnast, who is as swift with her movements as she tells me I am with my words. Marta gardens, throws pottery, levels the walls, and bakes her own sourdough from flour she mills on her countertop. She dresses in an outrageously bold sporty-boho way and deftly scavenges for most of her belongings. I doubt I know anyone else who knows as much about sustainable living as Marta does, and I’m certain I don’t know anyone else whose attitude toward sustainable values is as pragmatic and unzealous as hers. Marta is quickness and motion, brisk honesty, adaptability, curiosity, and harmonizing layers of dazzling color. She has a peculiar directness about her that is usually neither too much nor too cold, and I find this elusive quality immensely enlightening. When we talk, we go fast, but neither of us feels interrupted. Marta is not like me in more ways than she is like me, yet, over the years, we have shared more than we haven’t.
When I first came to visit Marta in the Copenhagen apartment of her Danish beau, she was a friend of a friend’s, someone I had heard of for years and met at last only recently. Marta was expecting her first son, Anakin. Soon I was pregnant, too, though my relationship with my Dane wasn’t going to last. By the time my half-Scandinavian son, Anker, was several months old, he and I had moved back to Warsaw—and Marta and Rasmus’s fourth-floor walk-up was fast becoming my home away from home.
Most years I come once and Anker joins me for a day or two. Then he spends a week or so with his Danish family while I tune mind and body to the frequencies of Marta, Rasmus, Anakin, and Anoke’s daily life. Invariably, I discover that sharing space, time, and energy with this family increases my capacity to share space, time, and energy with the rest of the world.
To say that Marta and her family have become like family to me is to express something crucial in partial terms. These friends who have been opening their home to me for over a decade are not merely like family: they are among my teachers of what it means to be a family. To live like family, to share counter space and household chores like family, to argue like family, and to make the guests feel like family, too.
This year Marta and Rasmus sold the Vesterbro one-bedroom I knew so well and bought nearly a hectare of land one hour away from the city, along with a complicated single-story house that needs lots of work. In an instant, their life became fruit trees and decisions as to which ones to cut down, nightly bonfires, advanced composting, dips in the cool fjord just an eight minute drive from the house, and taking new roads to new destinations.
My visit to Denmark this year was different not only because the countryside differs so much from the city, or because a house that needs work is not an apartment you’ve long outgrown. It was different, too, because as soon as I arrived, I started noticing how much of me had made the move from Vesterbro to Vig along with my friends. Items all around the house filled me with a sense of honorary ownership: things I had used, left, borrowed, given to Marta, first discovered thanks to Marta, or labeled by hand at Marta’s request. Though the town and the house were new, I was again walking onto the set of a part of my life that stretches back to the beginning of time as I measure it—from the dawn of my motherhood. (Being a mom doesn’t universally imbue women’s lives with purpose and meaning, but it has had that effect on me.)
Ground-level views onto the orchard outside are nothing like a fifth-story glimpse of Danish urban rooftops, yet they inspire similar contemplation. Of how I could live here, too. Of how I might invite more simple ease into my own, starker spaces.
The house was new, the place was different, but again I had come home to my friend and to the fast-moving dependability of her earth-meets-air nature. At the end of my nine-day stay, I used a permanent marker to write my friends’ names on their mailbox, as instructed. As we drove off, nostalgia was no match for the joy of connection.
Part Three
Shocking News One Month Later
Late September, 2021
Her text seems urgent. Am I sitting down, she asks. We are okay, she announces. The boys are safe. I hold my breath.
The fire had been swift. In the fifteen minutes it took Marta to pick up Anoke from school, the flames destroyed nearly all of the family’s belongings and reduced the new house to a shell of the home it was beginning to become. Electrical, possibly. In the kitchen. Every dish broke when the cabinets gave out. All of the pottery is in shards. Every gram of food got incinerated. The cookbooks, all of them, gone.
There hadn’t been enough time for the fire to go far, but the toxic smoke and soot have likely made all furniture, clothing, toys, books, shoes, and sports equipment unusable. The insurance company may well set them up with an RV in the yard for the duration of the restoration. A crew will deodorize the house, repaint walls recently painted by Marta, and rip out the ruined wall-to-wall carpet that was in line for replacing. Great timing, my friend laughs. She is all irony and courage, but never angry sarcasm, even now. Now, especially.
Marta says that in her shock she wasn’t able to dial the three-digit number for the fire department. She had yanked the door open, recoiled at the gust of black smoke, and run back to the car. In a hundred yards she was in the neighbors’ driveway. They’re the ones who called emergency services. Did this drive seem like it took a long time? Did it feel like an instant? In my shock, I didn’t think to ask.
My grief is complicated. My friends are safe. They are insured. I am relieved. My puzzling sense of co-ownership manifests as a compulsion to itemize losses. From object to object, my mind skips. The wooden box for storing nori. Hard drives with family photos. Anakin’s enormous tiger. Things I knew Marta had loved, things I had loved. Paradox confounds me. Haven’t I just begun writing about the joy I derive from knowing the objects in Marta’s home so intimately?
My helplessness is fleeting. I know spices, I know jars, I know boys. I know books well enough to know which of ours will be better off as Marta and Rasmus’s books. I awaken to the value of free space on my own bookshelves. My mind skips from object to object. Some have perished in a fire. Others have a journey ahead. Shelfspace among friends is a shared commodity.
Starting over is an energizing thing to have to do. Crisis creates opportunity. Resilience is a superpower. With Marta at the helm, a situation like this one is in steady hands. Hers can make anything, find everything. She is a magician.
A housefire raged and belongings were ruined, but a home stands, as full of life as ever.