Thursday, August 28, 2014

in-love-fallings, part one

When I first fell in love with ...
 
* clothes: When I was in my early twenties - for some reason didn't really care much before then - and found a catalogue with the romantic autumn collection of a certain Danish clothes brand. I had just returned from a summer of adventure in a foreign country and a brown-eyed boy who looked at me as if I was beautiful - and then broke my heart. I sat in a student apartment with my friends, leafed through the catalogue, felt excited about another year at university and more adventures, felt a delicious chill in the air and envisioned a whole new identity for me in those beautiful clothes.

* coffee: That teenage summer when I had my first real summer job, cutting grass in the cemetery. The permanent staff, two middle-aged ladies, asked me the first day if I drink coffee and I didn't dare to say no. So every day for a month, on our twice-daily coffee breaks, I choked down a cup. Strong, black, unsweetened. It almost put hair on my chest and certainly was a very Finnish thing to do. Only later I learned that most people start with lots of milk or cream and sugar in it. If they start at all. But my coffee-loving family seemed so proud of me that I never looked back.

* writing: When I was 11 years old and had two great friends, a new bike, pretend dogs, a real dog and felt as if I owned the world (or at least the neighbourhood). My friends and I decided to write a story. It was a fictional account of three girls with cool bikes and dogs and a neighbourhood just like ours. Names were changed to protect anonymity (mine became Pam, which I felt was the coolest name ever invented). After less than one page, the story was abandoned - by everyone except me, who went home to write a sequel. And another one. And another one.

* TV: Watching Lassie at a tender age, understanding nothing.

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