Keeping Score

The rest of March flew by in a whirlwind of exams, presentations, and projects. A brief spring break trip to Athens, a reprieve of architecture, history, and cats, then I came back to Finland and was once again in the thick of it. Writing my masters project proposal (MP2 for short), putting together my masters project proposal presentation (MP3, if you will), accumulating hours upon hours in the library.

Redbulls sprout on desks near hands of students, ripe for plucking, the air tense with concentration, hundreds of hands typing, pencils scribbling, track pads clicking.

Boredom feels to me as far away as the heat of summer, this northern country, these days in late April, trees just beginning to bud.

Temperatures just on this side of freezing, I leave the house with mittens but leave my hat at home. Drooping piles of snow desperately clinging to solidity in shadowed building corners, ice on the lakes completely gone. Spring came early this year I’m told, a quick snowmelt, weeks of temperatures above freezing, unexpected by many.

Sunrise at 5 am and sunset at 9 pm – I hold these long days in my hands with suspicion. Tomorrow, surely, the sun will set again at 3 pm, and in the morning I will wake up in the dark. And yet with each passing day the sun sets later, rises earlier, and once my classes end this semester, there will no longer be darkness at all.

Between the end of my classes in May and the start of my thesis data collection in June is a window too short for international travel, so I won’t be crossing the pond this summer.

Soon I’ll be at nine consecutive months in Finland, the longest I’ve ever been away from home. I’m currently at eight months two weeks, each day passing extending a streak I didn’t know I was keeping. There’s never been one summer of my life where I haven’t been in Montana. What happens when my unbroken streak is broken? Am I still the same, am I still me? How can I remain tethered to what I believe if all I have for reference is memory?

Peter, Paul, and Mary (1960):

Lord I’m one

Lord I’m two

Lord I’m three

Lord I’m four

Lord I’m five hundred miles from my home

Some days I can recall with perfect clarity the sun on my skin as I plant carrot seeds in my garden, or the way Ponderosa pines smell after rain. I chose this path away from home with conviction, but it doesn’t stop the ache of remembering balsam roots blooming in the mountains or standing at the edge of the river at sunset talking about everything, anything, so as not to say goodbye.

There are no winters past, there are no summers later. There is only spring, now, four thousand five hundred and ninety-four miles from my home.

In my first spring in Finland, I’ll think of hellish academic stressors, the endless emails and deadlines. But I’ll also think of the cracked red leather couch we dragged onto my balcony, skateboards on the road, running through campus in the dark. I’ll remember laughing so hard I have to lay down, eating fries at midnight, songbirds calling to one another in the tall, swaying pines.

In this strange country, this faraway land, I sing with friends and strangers at a bar and I don’t know the words, but I feel a connection, rooting, stretching, expanding.