Memory Game (Excerpt)

I caught the bouquet at my aunt’s wedding in Copenhagen. I didn’t mean to. It was a perfect July day, an endless Nordic day, with golden light stretching far into the night. The wedding was in a church across the street from the military barracks and the castle that houses the crown jewels, just south of the four manmade lakes and just north of the harbor; a brick church with tall arched windows and a cobblestone courtyard that set it back from the road.

The reception was in Kongens Have, the King’s Gardens. Topiaries and groomed gravel paths separated us from the castle and barracks. Karin stood on the single step into the tiny carriage house that held the catered food and glasses of champagne, and she threw those flowers over her head.

I was only standing in the crowd of blondes because I looked like them. Except their lashes were layered thick with mascara, their hair in perfect tresses across their collarbones, and I was frail and unadorned. The bouquet was a compact thing of pinks and whites, roses and Gerbera daisies. It landed right in my reluctant palms. Her friends looked disappointedly at me, angrily. I don’t want it, I said, but it was too late. I handed the flowers back to Karin. She side-smiled at me. Soon, she said, you’ll fall in love. She winked.

I was eighteen and it had been six months since my last period. Everyone but my mom complimented my waiflike appearance. In four months more, I would be put on forced medical leave from my first semester of college, dropped on the top floor of a hospital a few blocks from my high school.

My mother was born in Denmark and lived there until just before she became my mother. She moved to the States in 1984, and because she was the kind of immigrant that white Americans love, a white northern European immigrant, she had no trouble obtaining a permanent green card until she finally became a dual citizen one month before the 2016 presidential election. All of her family live in Denmark, which is why, in the summer of 2003 just after I graduated from high school in Maine, we were all in attendance as my aunt married for the first time.

I wore a white linen dress for my high school graduation, not unlike a wedding dress. The school I graduated from was WASPy like that—girls in white, boys in suits. The boys got cigars after, lit them up on the sports fields as they loosened their ties. By then my long hair was thin and my skin was a little fuzzy. I bought the dress at the Banana Republic outlet in Freeport with my friend Emily. It was long, grazing my ankles, and sleeveless. Wow, Emily said, You’re so pretty. You look so good in that dress. It was a size two, and I was aiming for zero.

My mom could see something was wrong; she saw it all summer. I could tell because of the way she held worry in the line of her mouth and the corners of her eyes. The way her gaze lingered on me, my arms and shoulders, the sweep of her eyes over my body. Being the subject of the up-and-down eye sweep feels like being consumed. Like the flesh on my soft bones is being taken, is there for the taking. Maybe at zero, I would be unconsumable. Or maybe I would be the most consumable.

My mom wasn’t trying to consume me, or maybe she was, for protection. She was trying to find things she did or didn’t have to worry about. Simultaneously looking for, and trying not to see, signs of the nightmare she feared was coming, the one that came.

Soon, my aunt said, You’ll fall in love.

Soon, she implied, Your life will look like this. Blonde women in dresses who won’t eat bread, trying to catch your fistful of roses, a man in a suit with a cigar who thinks he’ll take care of you. You caught the bouquet; that means you’re next.

In Old Norse mythology, there is a tree called Yggdrasil. Eleven rivers flow from it. It is a sacred tree, and it is an ash. Ash trees are currently under threat from the emerald ash borer, found for the first time in the U.S. in Michigan in 2002. It was found in St. Paul, where my forestry-working sister lives, in 2009; in Maine, which I still sometimes call home, the first discovery was 2018, and as of 2020, it is all over the state. As the climate changes due to settler capitalist behavior, there will be fewer days cold enough to kill the beetle, and it will continue to spread.

Yggdrasil’s branches and roots hold nine worlds. Its three roots are in Hel, the underworld, which is described as a place of gloomy mist; Midgard, where humans live on earth; and Jotunheim, home of the giants. When the giants and the gods go to battle, that’s Ragnarok—the apocalypse. Everyone knows this from the Marvel movies with one of those Hemsworth brothers, though in my opinion the only worthwhile thing about those films is Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie. But in pre-Christian northern Europe, Yggdrasil is the wildlife-and-water-filled heart around which everything else exists. Time and space are cyclical there.

European settlers on Turtle Island have a long and brutal history of removing obstructions in rivers and earth to create smooth shipping and logging channels, building new obstructions instead. Before Europeans arrived, the Duwamish River in what is called Washington State, where I live now, was a curly ribbon, lush with salmon and fertile alluvial soil, its watershed stretching along more than 1600 miles. Settlers flattened its edges for industrial use, shrinking its watershed to 480 miles. In 2001, the EPA declared the Lower Duwamish Waterway, the only river in Seattle, a Superfund Site. The multi-phase cleanup process will not even be fully underway until at least 2024. It takes vast amounts of time and care to undo the kind of concentrated abuse that results, for example, in a Superfund Site. The river, the earth, the beings that live here, we may not survive.

The body of water called Merrymeeting Bay is not a bay in the way of other bodies of water called bay. It’s a tidal freshwater bay, or inland delta, or tidal riverine, depending on who you ask. Six rivers flow into it: the Kennebec, Androscoggin, Cathance, Eastern, Abagadasset, and Muddy.

I worked on a farm by Merrymeeting Bay for most of my 20s. We, the collective organism of the Six River Farm crew, ate lunch on its shores every spring, summer, fall day. Hollow stalks of grasses and reeds, muddy flats, logs nudged a few inches by the tide, the creep of knotweed at its edges. Calm water, angry water, gray water, blue. On hot days, we jumped off the one-lane bridge after work. The water soaked into the scrapes on our arms from zucchini vines, it dissolved the sticky yellow residue from tomato vines, it soothed the sinewy fibers of our tendon vines.

We sometimes challenged each other to name all six rivers, a memory game.

My uncle bought a house in Tisvilde, on the northern coast of Sjaelland in Denmark, in 1993. It was an old camp, two small houses connected by a covered patio with grapevines growing on the ceiling beams. Although it was my uncle’s house, it became a place everyone shared, and on our annual trips to Denmark we spent most of our time there instead of at my grandparents’ apartment in the city. The 147 stairs down the sandy, Rugosa-covered cliffs to the beach were not yet broken from lack of maintenance, and we went to them early in the day, running down them carrying towels and a small plastic cooler of Ribena elderberry juice boxes and squares of rugbrød sandwiches. We didn’t swim so much as splash each other, and sometimes ride the small waves that made it past the breakwaters. Late at night, we watched the sun set in pastel pinks and oranges from the beach, and raced each other up the stairs to watch it disappear again from the top of the cliff.

As a child, I didn’t mind sleeping in gritty sheets, and went to bed sandy and salty every night. Our mother pulled the yellow shades against the dregs of the 10pm light and the yellow quilts up to our chins and kissed us goodnight before going to watch crime dramas with the other adults. Outside the kitchen door, tiny wild strawberries grew by the garden wall; against the wooden fence between our small yard and the neighbors’ grew fat gooseberries that puckered our mouths; in the spring, the two cherry trees between which laundry lines were strung bore the sweetest, reddest cherries I knew. This was all part of the story we grew up inside, my great grandparents and my grandparents and my mom, my siblings, me.

The word Tisvilde comes from Tyr’s vaelde, meaning a place dedicated to Tyr, one of the Norse gods of war and justice. The coupling of “war” and “justice” speaks to the Viking and European and overall imperialist ethos of the people I come from, on both sides. Tyr’s claim to fame is that he sacrificed his hand to the wolf Fenrir while the other gods bound the animal. Fenrir’s threat was that he would devour the sun. In the time before severe human-created climate change, and still now, the sun keeps nordic people going. Winter is long, dark, wet and cold. The sun hangs low and is walled behind a permanent gray or a damp black sky. The abundance of light in the summer turns the days to joy, or at least makes joy more possible. It’s not the only factor, of course, but it goes a long way.

In the summer of 2018, there was a heatwave across Europe that was so strong it scorched the grass and turned the chestnut and beech leaves brown. Even Tisvilde was unbearably hot. My sister Lily and I stood in the ocean water to save our feet from the burning sand. We submerged our bodies in the sea for relief, but it didn’t wash away the fear. It didn’t cleanse our grief for a future that looked like this, and worse. Fenrir’s threat is nothing compared to the one we made ourselves.

There is a small grassy spot not far from the beach in Tisvilde called Helenekilde, or Sankt Helene’s Spring. It’s actually a grave and not the spring itself. Saint Helene was a Swedish girl. Like other girl saints, the story goes, she was unmarried when she was killed and cast into the sea, martyred. She washed up on the shore near a spring. The spring where her body landed was used for hundreds of years as a healing place; sick and dying people made pilgrimages there on Midsummer’s Eve and walked away cured.

The soft moss and grass around the little stone grave marker embedded in the earth, surrounded by a low stone wall, is maybe not magic, but a place for thinking about what it means to be sick, what it means to be cured. What it means to walk away, and from what. Do those of us who are called sick, who internalize a sick identity and carry it like a scar or a thorny rose, walk away from ourselves? What is sickness under a sick regime? If I call myself mentally ill, if I confess to a disorder, what am I doing to myself with those words? To what extent am I responsible, and to what extent is the empire poisoning me and calling it my fault?

If you google Helenekilde, the first thing that comes up is the website for Helenekilde Badehotel, which is an airy white-walled hotel on a private stretch of beach, and one of the most elite vacation spots in the country. High-power politicians go there both in real life and in TV shows. In the 30 years since my uncle bought that little yellow house, Tisvilde’s narrow main street choked with Maseratis and Jaguars and BMW convertibles; its cafes and ice cream stands turned New Nordic; its July days filled with the young and blonde, attending summer music festivals and drinking on the beach. Tisvilde is now often referred to as the Danish Riviera. What kind of illnesses would a girl saint find here? What kind of cures?

One of my favorite stories about the norse gods is that Odin gave his eye in order to gain more knowledge. That’s how he apparently discovered the runes, which were not just letters but keepers of secret and mystery. They are symbols of powerful forces in the universe. Or so the story goes.

I continue to sacrifice parts of myself for more knowledge, keep giving parts of my body over to the mysterious letters in order to try and understand things more deeply. Maybe we all do this in our own ways. Obsession and sacrifice seem like pretty universal experiences. I wouldn’t give my actual eye because to me that seems melodramatic; but I would give my bones, my skin, my flayed heart.

The house where my parents live in Maine was built in the early 1850s. It was the site of a mill for close to a century. The 19^th^ century European settlers loved building things with wood. There was so much of it, and they decided that meant it could be theirs. They floated logs down all six rivers. They removed the obstructions. They milled logs into boards for houses, barns, churches, freight sheds, ships. They stacked the boards on land that other settlers had decided to build on. Land for sale, trees for sale, water views for sale.

There are remnants of mills all over the islands and coastline. Jagged skeletons visible at low tide, wheel spokes like ribcages in the mud. Rotted pilings like limbs in the water.

When I was in high school and my brother Theo was in middle school, we sometimes got along for enough time to go on exploratory hikes in the woods near our house. We walked across the causeway, which floods more and more now, to the edge of our neighbors’ land, a muddy lip of pines, oaks, and ash nudging against cattails and marsh grass. There’s an old shack there, tilted and leaning like a rhombus, but it remains standing even now. As if it is perfectly content to live in precarity, to embody it the way America has always asked. Its door is gone and windows glassless, but its floorboards persist, along with the remnants of a chair, some iron bedsprings, a bit of stovepipe. From the road it is nearly invisible; it blends in with the brown winter leaves and rough gray bark and swirls of brackish water that surround it.

Theo and I found our common ground in entering cold, cavernous places with histories we wouldn’t know. The shack by the marsh, the barn next to our house, the barn in Pennsylvania where our grandmother threw a birthday party for everyone but herself, a goodbye party in disguise.

Rivers are sometimes seen as borders by people who like to see borders. The border between Maine and New Hampshire, for example, is the middle of the Piscataqua River. This river kept its Abenaki name, but the line in the middle is imaginary. On one side of the river is Kittery, Maine, and on the other side, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On an island in the middle called Seavey’s Island is the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. According to the borders, the shipyard is in Maine, even though it bears New Hampshire’s name. All of this is meaningless as far as the land itself is concerned, but it was nonetheless the subject of a border dispute between the states that ended in 2001 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the naval shipyard was actually in Maine. It’s important to know who owns what; that is one of the foundational principles of the settler state.

In World War II, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard became the site in which four surrendered German U-Boats were stored, and their crews kept as POWs. One of the U-Boats carried a secret stash of uranium oxide from the German nuclear weapons program. The material was seized and given to the Manhattan Project instead. It was in the bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima.

History is a web of tributaries and branches. I grew up not far from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and even closer to Bath Iron Works, which during World War II launched a destroyer every 17 days. My dad’s father, who we called the Danish word for grandfather Farfar even though he wasn’t Danish, was in the Navy during that war, on an aircraft carrier that also carried an atomic weapon, one that was never detonated. Meanwhile, my great grandfather in Denmark, Jens, was working with an underground resistance and bombing German supply trains. Whether he killed anyone, I’ll never know. He was captured and tortured for several days. Somehow he escaped, or was let go. When he returned to my great grandmother, Edith, and my grandfather, who was a baby, they fled to the countryside in Jylland. They laid low on a farm. My grandfather doesn’t remember much from that time, and Jens never talked about it. On the summer afternoons we spent at Jens and Edith’s house, where Edith painted flowers on ceramics and on canvas and grew the real ones outside in her garden, Jens smoked cigarettes and told us not to touch the grenade he kept in the hallway. He said it was from the war but wouldn’t answer questions about it. No one pushed him, because we saw the shadow in his eyes and the tightness in his lips. Edith would come into the room with a pitcher of elderflower cordial and usher us outside onto the sunny patio. She brought plates of smørrebrød with liver paste and egg and tomato, followed by a tin of butter cookies. I didn’t think too hard about the grenade, or the war, or the pain they carried.

When Edith died, I got some of her art—some watercolor paintings of pink flowers; an oval ceramic sign to hang on the door that says Er i haven (In the garden) in her long, slanted cursive; a narrow scroll of embroidery with landmarks from all over Denmark: famous old churches and fields with red cows and a mound of Jelling stones and the statue of the little mermaid. All of these things hang on my walls. Other things I have from her: a sweet tooth, a quiet devotion to art, bones like sand. When hers got really bad, when the osteoporosis made it so she was in constant pain, she stopped eating. She lay still on the bed and didn’t even look at her paintbrushes, though she might have looked out the window at the sweet-smelling Rugosa and translucent redcurrant on the other side of the glass. She died that way. Maybe I will too.

I should tell my Danish grandmother: my skeleton is jagged. Did you see it coming?

I should send a telepathic message to my American grandmother’s ghost: You promised your skeleton to me, but it is ash now. I miss you.

Here’s the thing with my bones. They are like runes, and they are like ruins. They are unreadable and look ancient. My Odin’s eye is the MRI machine. I have been in MRI machines on all three UW hospital campuses and one of the clinics. Sometimes, instead of an MRI, I get a bone scan, which is quieter. For a contrast bone scan, they inject me with dye and a few hours later I come back and watch constellations float around a screen that is attached to the machine scanning a part of my body, a foot or a knee. It looks like the milky way, stars against a digital black; it’s almost calming. The other Odin’s eye is a Dexa scanner, but that one only tells me what I already know. Osteopenia is the official diagnosis; the river drained out of me, only sand left.

My mom married my dad in Denmark when she was twenty. In the photo from their wedding day that sits framed on her desk, they both look young, but she looks youngest. My dad, at 28, already had a receding hairline, and a skinny body maintained by a steady diet of coffee, cigarettes, and wine, every day, in that order. My mom wears a simple white dress and a flower crown of pinks and whites resting on her dark pixie-cut hair. In this photo, she is the fairy. Her youth spills off of her in bubbling waves, even through the faded color of the photograph, even across almost four decades.

The etymology of Danmark is unclear, but Dan comes from a word meaning “flat land,” and mark probably refers to forests in the southern part of Jylland. Mark in modern Danish means “field.” The Danes are straightforward with their language, in meaning if not in decipherable speech. It is the only country in the world to use the word “ghetto” to officially denote residential areas. The definition has everything to do with demographics: income levels and employment status, race and ethnic background, education levels. One such neighborhood, Nørrebro, is where I lived with a roommate during my semester abroad during undergrad. Every time I was lucky enough to have the chance to go abroad for my education, I went to Denmark. I went in undergrad and I went for graduate school. I flew there like a Luna moth, my body drawn there as if the land itself was light and heat. Luna moths are all over the eastern part of Turtle Island, but in Europe they’re found only as vagrants. That was me, delicate and lime green, unsure where my home was, body built from love for places that may or may not suit me. Where I may or may not belong.

Sjaelland translates to “soul land.” It is one of 406 islands in Denmark. Maine has 4600. My family is from islands. Holding their names is a memory game.

In soul land, there are no mountains. There are chalky white cliffs that look like the moon and trees twisted by onshore winds. There are grassy dunes, archipelagos, lakes, birch forests. Nowhere in the country are you farther than 32 miles from the sea.

In colonized Wabanaki territory, the land shows its history of being raked over by glaciers. The mountains are small, the granite is pink scratches on the earth. Raised like scars, like the one on my wrist from when it broke glass, like the ones on my grandmother’s lungs.

Glaciation deposited unconsolidated sediments across what is now called in English the state of Maine. The retreat of glaciers created hundreds of ponds and lakes in the land I keep calling home.

I am unconsolidated, and I am sediment. Rode here on a sheet of ice, stayed where my cold ancestors deposited me.

Pennsylvania, June 1995. The sun is milky yellow, a calm warmth. My cousin Kayla is in a violet dress, lace around the neckline, hair long and smooth down her back. I’m in a dress too, with frilly short sleeves, dark purple flowers. The side doors of the barn are open, allowing light to flood its cold interior. I stand on the grassy slope outside the doors, realizing I’ve never seen them open, never seen the barn like this before. Sunshine reaching into a place that usually feels so hidden, its secrets buried in dust.

Someone hung colorful streamers from the rafters, maybe my dad. A garland of silver letters drapes across the entryway: HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Round tables populate the swept-off concrete floor, paper plates and red Solo cups and plastic utensils stacked neatly on one of the tables in the back.

You’re it! Theo shouts as he slaps my arm and runs off into the knobby apple trees of the small orchard. Everything around us is big and green, tall grass, wide swaths of blackberry canes and wildflowers. Theo is small but fast, his blue button-down already untucked.

I’m not playing! I yell after him, turning back toward Kayla in the cool shadow of the barn. She ducks into the old stable and comes out with a half-deflated basketball. Throws it at the netless hoop mounted on one of the beams and misses. The ball doesn’t even bounce when it lands. She giggles. I take her hand and say, Come on, let’s go find Farmor.

This is supposed to be a birthday party for all of the June babies: me, my dad, my grandfather, several of my cousins. Jane, but she’s not here. I will continue to believe the birthday party lie until I am well into adulthood, when the truth of it will hit me like a deflated basketball in the face.

Farmor comes out of the house carrying a tray of smoked salmon on rye bread—my mother’s Nordic contribution, one of her favorite foods, and mine. When Farmor sees us, she says in her scratchy voice, Sugar-dee, sugar-doo, will you help carry the rest of the appetizers out? We do as she asks because we love her more than anyone, even each other. Her hair is already short; she lost her long white locks to chemo but that already seems like ages ago to me. Now it’s a fine white pixie, but she’s stronger than a fairy, and her eyes are bright, her smile calm. She walks just fine and weaves at her loom every morning. I believe she is no longer sick, that she will be with me for the rest of my life.

When she begins dying in earnest, which takes most of my sixth grade year, my dad and I will drive back to this place, this house of joy and pain, every single weekend. At first she just seems a little tired. But as the cold creeps in through the rafters and the cracks under the doors, and the house gets smaller, and her world shrinks to the size of her room, and then to the size of her hospice bed, I will sometimes leave the house and go to the barn. Stand in the dark gray of it, my winter coat zipped up to my chin, my frozen fingers gripping that now almost fully deflated basketball, dull silver light only just making the hoop visible. I will throw the ball towards it again and again. I will make rules, like if this one goes in, she’ll feel better today. If this one goes in, she’ll feel better next week. If this one goes in, she won’t die.

The sunshine that day of the June party was kind and generous, and I will come to understand it as the last good day, at least for her. There was chocolate cake with white frosting and marzipan flowers. Kayla and I spent the whole afternoon laughing, Farmor’s hands on our heads and shoulders, watching our brothers chase each other through the orchard. We felt lucky, but we didn’t know how much. In two years, this memory would feel so far away as to have existed on another plane, in another dimension. Farmor would turn 65, and then her skeleton would be burned and buried.

In Norse mythology, the first creature to come into being was a hermaphroditic giant called Ymir. He was created when fire and ice met in the abyss, which was called Ginnungagap, into which Ragnarok will supposedly send us again one day. Ymir was the chaos from which so-called order emerged. Giants, the ancestors of gods, who were the ancestors of humans, were spontaneously created from his legs and the sweat of his armpits. I find this weird imagery funny, and I like it, because I like the idea that legs and sweat and asexual reproduction is the stuff that eventually made people. We are indeed a strange and chaotic life form; we are giant in a lot of ways.

The word gap in Ginnungagap indicates an empty space, a void, a nothing. Gaps are everywhere, in mountains and forests, in individual and collective memory, between words and feeling; gaps are all over my life.

In the nothing there is only possibility. On the flip side, in pure possibility, there is nothing.