Hermit in the woods

My father and his wife own a cottage with two other families, so they have the right to it every third week. They don’t always make use of it, though, and when they do it’s often just for the weekend, and they are very generous about lending it to us, their children, when it’s not in use. Meanwhile, YT is pretty much the only one who is flexible enough to be able to make use of it during regular weekdays, because I’m the only one who doesn’t have a real job.

It’s such a great retreat and I love to sneak off there by myself for a few days. I’ve just come back and this time, because my father and his wife are away for a few weeks, we were able to use their entire seven days. So EPI and I went up there for the weekend and he left on Monday morning for work, while I stayed on and, well, worked [the luxury of having a laptop for an office]. I love the solitude and the few days’ throwback to living all by myself with nobody else to worry about, being able to distribute my toiletries all over the bathroom and hang my bikini in the shower until I need to use it again, eating when I’m hungry, sleeping when I’m tired. All that.

Something like this would probably only work in Iceland, though, and really only in the summer. So far I have not been partial to the idea of heading up there by myself in the winter, when it is dark [it’s easy to feel safe in the middle of the night when it’s bright daylight outside]. I recall one valiant attempt at solitude at my aunt and uncle’s cottage in Canada, when I stayed behind, as I recall, in order to write something profound and brilliant. A futile exercise: I fled home the next day after a late-night encounter with a large and particularly grotesque spider, as well as another large unidentified insect that was actually intelligent enough to fly into the room, then turn its head and look at me! Thankfully there are no such horrifying creatures here, although it has to be said that the Icelandic specimen of spider is completely disgusting and never fails to give me the heebie-jeebies.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a picture of the sunset, taken last weekend almost exactly at midnight.

Weather today: Absolutely divine, so that I could hardly tear myself away from the country. I sunbathed on the deck for as long as I could before I absolutely had to head home, and it was HOT, probably around 30°C where there was shelter from the wind. Driving into town I was one of the few cars going that way, whereas the traffic out of town was bumper-to-bumper: this is one of the Nicelanders’ main travelling weekends [although it seems that lately every summer weekend has become a major travelling weekend. Right now at midnight it’s 11°C in the capital [52F], sunrise was at 3.13 am and sunset at 11.50 pm.