Glimpses from a quarantine

This June has been a strange month for most of us, and the strangeness has taken different forms. For me, these four weeks have been especially marked by my return to Norway for the summer, and the preparations and practicalities this has entailed. Since I had spent the preceding six months in Sweden, there were several details concerning travel that needed to be sorted, and there was also the not so small matter of the quarantine upon my arrival in Norway. Luckily, as I live in the rural district, and since we, in my family, have a cabin that we normally rent to tourists, I could go into exile right in the middle of my favourite scenery. In this I have been extremely fortunate, and the lack of a stable Internet connection did, in the end, prove quite a boon as it did not provide me with distractions from the relaxing surroundings. I stayed in this cabin for eleven days, during which I enjoyed the many impressions of the landscape and its inhabitants - such as the flock of thirty-odd Canada geese that landed on the lake one morning - and during which I spent a lot of time reading. After months spent sitting in a small one-room building in Sweden worrying about the lack of concrete measures against the ongoing pandemic and going slightly mad, the wide, unrestrained vistas available to me were nothing short of paradisaical. As a conclusion to June 2020, I have gathered some glimpses from my quarantine here, and I hope to return to some of these excursions in future blogposts.