The Norwegian Farm Boy
My mother spent her senior year in Denmark.
I never studied abroad because my priorities lay elsewhere and, though I don’t actively regret it, I feel the loss like a phantom limb. Throughout my childhood and teenage years hearing my mother recount the extended stays she had in France and Denmark, picking up languages and adventure as she went, I have taken the memories on as my own.
I can picture the street in France where a young suitor wooed her when she was 16. I can feel under my fingers the bulky scarf that she knit dutifully throughout her year at a Danish high school, to ward off homesickness.
I can see her diary, as it listed gently, like a sailboat on a steady, insistent wind, from English scrawl into Danish, her secrets themselves crossing continents. I feel it was me sitting at her desk, hewn by the sway of immersion into a more worldly specimen of girl.
Mostly mothers live through their children, and that trope certainly holds, but in this one regard, my mother as a multilingual exchange student: This I am left to experience vicariously, since I was never a teen traveling the world in the mid-60s and, surely now, never can be.
There is one story my mother told me from this time period that is so visually alive in my mind and, more than becoming a recollection of my own, it occupies my memory like a tall tale within the canon: Paul Bunyan, Persephone and the Underworld, and this one, The Norwegian Farm Boy.
My mother is 19 and has decided to take her flute, which she plays beautifully at this time in her life, into the Norwegian forest for a stroll on a glorious, crisp fall day. The foliage sits heavily on the trees, which are bursting with sumptuous color and Norwegian vigor. Hygge, socialized healthcare, whatever that means to you: The trees were like that.
My mother is swaddled in a Scandinavian sweater and carries her shapeless rucksack, whose contents shift in time with her agile steps upward.
She’s outside Oslo now, in a rural locale, staying at a well-appointed hostel. Norway allows for travel northward and my mother, having seen Denmark, has returned to the region to further her Scandinavian exploration.
She has wandered well into the forest and the trees are dense. She is alone and her flute tunes are lilting high and light over the hilltops. Maybe she’s playing Mozart, or a simpler tune, or switching back and forth with whatever suits her fluctuating fancy. She’s hiking and simultaneously maintaining a playing embouchure and is not winded by this feat.
My mother hears a rustling in the leaves. Her playing halts and the last flute note lingers a moment, then stops dead in the cooling air. She holds her breath to listen. The something that she hears… is much bigger than a squirrel.
A large, pale man emerges from the cover of trees.
In her description, he is a Norwegian farm boy. Blonde, strapping, dressed for farm work.
He grabs her from the path, restrains her arms and commands in Norwegian that she take off her shirt. He towers over her: 6’7” to her 5’1”.
My mother is dumbfounded with terror, but his next words throw her more off-kilter still:
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