‘Biting off more than we can chew’ surely must be among the most common of life’s conundrums. And it is absolutely one of the things I do best. Too many goals and projects to accomplish before ability kills possibility.

I’m sitting here surrounded by my books and papers, everything I need for the second post of Decades to emerge. So why this feeling of existential weariness instead of that of the eager writer? Not that kicking off a morning’s writing (or almost any other activity) is necessarily easy in the best of times…but, as I discover anew every single day, this kind of soul-sucking apathy that comes and goes does seem a not uncommon symptom of old age, and that’s not going away whatever I imbibe, read, or ponder.

An age-inspired lament is bound to appear here now and then. Be patient…someday it will be you….

Decades essays will usually be divided between the goings-on of the world around me and how that is affecting me and mine. Allow me to mostly skip world affairs this time, since I’m initially describing a life from a thousand plus years ago. 

Let me introduce Grandma-to-the-nth-degree, Gudrid, of Viking times.  Although I’m not sure that even my full-blooded Scandinavian self can link back to an amazing woman named Gudrid who lived somewhere around the turn of first to the second millennium (980-1050, give or take….). She was born in Iceland, traveled to Greenland, lived for some time in Vinland (Newfoundland), traveled back and forth to Norway (whence originated the settlers of Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland), married more than once, bore two sons, one of whom, Snorri, lived to be a founder of Christianity in Iceland. To top it all off, after Snorri was grown, Gudrid traveled to Rome, and perhaps met the pope (it is said… with absolutely no proof). While she was away, Snorri built a church on their property and, when Gudrid returned, she moved into it and lived out her years there as a hermit nun.

Fairy tale, myth, fake news, you say. Well, actually Gudrid is mentioned in two of the Icelandic sagas, and substantial research, archeological and otherwise, has been conducted to verify the outlines of much of her story. My bona fides for sharing Gudrid’ s story come from reading a number of fine Viking histories, and in the process coming upon The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown. I read Gudrid’s story twice back then, and am scanning it again now for the sheer pleasure of a story well told. It is the best of books for someone like me, who claims reading interests in history, travel literature, and Nordic Noir murder mysteries—and, Odin knows, there is a plentiful amount of all of the above in the sagas. Brown takes us on a good tramp through the history and over land where Gudrid and her friends and relatives surely played out good chunks of their lives. I am proud to be able to say I did just enough tramping about myself on these Viking sites to claim that thrill of ‘been there, [imagined doing] that’.

Perhaps, right now, before I even begin the real ‘decades’ stories of my family and me in the dramas of the twentieth and twenty-first century, is a good time to say something about who I think I am. At this moment in time. Everything I’ll write about as long as I writing essays for Decades will be about the world and me, and here’s an intro to just this one part of me, I especially like. The “Girl from the North Country” part—Dylan likely did not write that song for me, but who can say for sure! By ancestry, birth, travel, and desire, I declare her to be me. One of the mantras of modern times says we get to choose our personas, right? Well, I choose to be a ‘girl from the north country’, a Northerner (never mind that half of my long life has been in New Mexico). It all stems from being born and growing up in far north Koochiching County, Minnesota in a family of Norskis. I may as well attribute my restlessness, my obsession with travel to being descended from Vikings (okay, so I know that’s silly/my dad, coming to this country on a ship across the ocean and being one generation closer to Vikingness, hated travel!).

When I’m in the far north, it feels right. Whether the fermented shark and old guy playing the accordion in a Reykjavik restaurant; sheep herding border collies and the iceberg standing guard in a harbor in Greenland; the cousins and farikal and fjords of Norway; the summer markets of Helsinki with stall upon stall of blueberries, gooseberries, cloudberries, lingonberries, cranberries; reindeer feasts and meatballs in Sweden; too many Danish pastries and Isak Dinesen (way out of Africa )in Denmark; pickled herring and reindeer in Alaska; good government in Canada; and old babushkas, headscarves tied under their chins, in the Siberian taiga. Here’s to calm hospitality, icebergs, so much beer and pizza (!), even more bread and butter, green and blue/forest and water, socialism—almost all over the north. I wonder what would Gudrid make of how many hot dogs people eat in modern Norway? But she’d feel at home with seal dishes in Greenland and skyr in Iceland. 

I planned to write a little more about my times in Iceland and Greenland. Instead, you can have some words and multitudes of colorful photos by going to a couple of my long-ago blog posts at Time and Place (mneset.me). I’m afraid I did not set it up at the time to make scrolling the archives simple. You could scroll to 2012 and 2014 but it’s cumbersome without easily accessible date. Sorry for that. What would be easy is googling the posts by copying and pasting the following addresses: “Viking Greenland” (https://mneset.me/2016/07/19/the-greenland-download-from-mind-heart-and-camera-continues/)  and “Iceland…Go Vikings” (https://mneset.me/2012/08/10/iceland-go-vikings/).

Actually, the photos on these sites will make the effort all worthwhile!

Alternately, you can also read something about the trips in Window Seat (my book), but without so many words and pictures. That would plug you into all of my travel tales…should you be into that sort of thing.

I could not resist beginning the small stories of Decades with Gudrid. Identifying right away with a long-ago woman called ‘far traveler.’ So, you’ll think of me that way as you read. So, I’ll think of me that way as I write.