People's lives

On two people who lived their own ways in small villages, decades and continents apart

Photo by Michail Sapiton on Unsplash

When I first moved to Linnesby, my neighbour W. took a walk with me every day. It was during the pandemic, and the walks were a way to combine fresh air and conversation.

While we walked, W. told me stories about his childhood, or about the history of the village before his own time.

One story that captured my imagination was of a friend of W.’s father: Viktor, as I’ll call him here. Viktor wasn’t from Linnesby originally, but moved here after being mobilised with W.’s father during the war.

I got the sense that when his service ended he didn’t have a particular place to go to and so followed along with his friend back here to Linnesby, where he bought a house a fair distance outside of town, with no electricity or running water. There he kept chickens, heated his house with a wood-burning stove, and worked as a day labourer on construction crews when he needed money.

Once a construction project he was working on ran over, and the head of the crew offered Viktor several months’ additional work. Viktor turned him down: “I’ve got as much money as I need for now, thanks.”

When Viktor came over the W.’s house for dinner, which he did occasionally, he would grow restless after a bit and say that it was time to be off home.

“After all, No One is waiting for me,” he’d joke, using a Swedish word for “no one” that sounds a bit like a woman’s name.

Viktor made sure to carry his own weight. “Nothing was ever said,” W. told me, “but if Father was over there one day helping him fix his roof, he’d come by the morning after with a chicken for my mother, that kind of thing.”

Viktor seems to have been bit of an “original,” or a character. But the main reason I asked to hear more about him is that one of the major memories that W. and others shared is of him bicycling into the village once a week to pick up his deliveries of books.

Apparently the small house with the chickens and no electricity or running water was filled with bookshelves. It was a home that supported a life full of reading.

Once I walked with W. to where Viktor’s house had been. The walk was twice as long as any of our usual walks, and we took thermoses of coffee along and sat down with them on the way, on the ruins of what had once been a farmhouse but had burned down several generations before.

The spot was pleasing, amid trees and beside fields, not far from a ridge where birds of prey soar overhead.

I don’t know if Viktor was enjoyable to be around, or if he was kind, or if he was a thinker as well as a reader. I don’t know if he wrote. I don’t know if his life was idea-driven, or closely connected to the material world, or, as with Thoreau, both of those. I don’t know anything about him, really.

I’ve created an image for myself, however, from what little I do know: an idea of someone who, without having had the chance to get much of an education, loved books, and reading, and created for himself the life that he wanted: living in the woods, tending his chickens and his wood-burning stove, occasionally joining his friend and his friend’s family, including the young W., for dinner, and cycling into town and riding home once a week with a box of new books in the basket of his bike.

I’d very much have liked to have met him.

***

Mim, who lived in my little hippie village in California when I was growing up, was probably of Viktor’s generation. She died when I was 10 or 11.

Mim too was an original. She lived in an RV that was parked on one of the town’s many unpaved roads. I vaguely remember, though I could be wrong, that originally it was a smaller RV, and then later a larger, better one, which her adult son had come and bought for her. I understood even at that age that Mim was probably not an easy parent for an adult child to try to take care of.

I remember stopping by once to say hello, and being invited in to join her in listening to a recording of whale songs. We sat there for a long time, listening to the low, eerie sounds filling the small space of her home.

Another time, I admired the rose-painted cup she gave me juice in, and she pressed it into my hands to keep, not taking no for an answer.

Mim painted, and she crocheted medicine pouch necklaces, little round bags crocheted in a spiral design, full of colours. In my memory, which is surely wrong, there was a time when half the village — which is to say, the adults, and me; most of the other kids didn’t do things like this — walked around with one of Mim’s medicine bags around their necks.

I distinctly remember her telling me, with some upset, that she was going to be turning 60 soon, and that that was very old; and my telling her, truthfully, that 60 didn’t sound all that old to me.

Later, in a scrapbook that I kept during those years, I wrote a memory of her, beside a painting she’d made that I’d pasted into the book. I was almost 12 when I wrote it.

This is the text I wrote beside her painting, in green calligraphy ink:

Done by MIM, 9 months to a year before she died.

She was watching someone’s house for a week, and [my mother] and I went to pick her up to go someplace, or to drop her off, or something. She invited us in, and showed us her room. She also showed us several pictures she had drawn. This one really caught my fancy because of the golden paint, and I told her it was beautiful. She gave it to me. She was very, very generous. [….]

One of the last poems Mim wrote, that she wrote several months before she died, was this: “Fancy a soft cloud, and have a good night’s sleep. When you’re down, think up, and if you’re up, think upper!”

….[S]he had a generous spirit, and a loving spirit, and I loved her very much.

I’m almost as old now as Mim was when I knew her. When I think of her, I remember her presence, and her warmth, and how much people in town loved her, eccentric or not.

In last week’s essay, and the one before that, I wrote about considerations of what it means to do one’s bit in the world, and about the impact of connection, and of being present.

I only knew Mim a little, and Viktor not at all, which is in part why I’ve changed his name in this essay. But somehow their stories, as I understand them, have become a part of who I am today. They’ve been told to or remembered by me, and I had the desire to tell them further, in this essay.

That, surely, is as strong a sign of presence, and how much it matters, what we share of our lives, as anything could be.

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Thanks to

Ann Kennedy Smith

,

Mark Bramhall

,

Nick Hornby

,

Emma Hemingford

,

Deborah Vass

,

Jacqueline Saville

,

Tina Lee Forsee

,

Anna Schott

,

Jeremy Noel-Tod

,

Victoria

, and

June Girvin

for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.

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