Family

Travel to Norway is more than seeing the landscape, the fjords, the opera house. It is being with family. Over the years we have visited and been visited by my cousins (Knut's "farmor" and my "farfar" were brother and sister) about eight times, beginning in 1965 when I was a student at Oslo summer school. I was following in a pattern established by my mother who had "gone home" to Norway several times with her friends and cousins.

And so here we are again after 13 years from the last visit...way too long an absence. The young men of 1965 have become parents; their parents have become old men; their boys have become young men. But the women are still beautiful.

These links across years, across oceans and countries are easier now than when my parents and grandparents left Norway for the New World. Somehow that New World seems older, more worn out, than this land with its new roads, bright, neat towns, and fields of grain ripening in the long summer days. Yet the relationships between our families and our countries unfold in new ways which will be interesting to see.