Have you ever sat down on a Sunday and thought, “This week is going to be a pretty normal sort of week” and then sat down on the following Sunday and thought, “No, no that was not” but in a very pleased sort of way? That was this week. It was nothing like I thought it would be, but it was a lovely week in the end, mostly because it was a week full of good people and you need those kinds of weeks now and then.
Monday I had lunch with Ashley, a former student and now friend, and we had a lovely time catching up on our lives before heading off to our respective errands and appointments.
Wednesday Kim invited some old friends from Home Campus for dinner. Linda, Nancy, and Marty came by and we made pizzas and sat out back and mostly talked of our various travels and the stories those inevitably provide until a gentle rain started and we had to go inside.
And on Thursday, our Swedish friend Maria came over for a couple of days. She’d been bouncing around the midwest for a bit – first to her former exchange host family in Indiana, then to a wedding in Minnesota, then to her sister’s former host family in Wisconsin, and then to us. We found out about this a couple of days in advance and of course you can come and stay with us why would you even worry about that!
Carter brought her here on Thursday night and we had a lovely evening hanging out in the back, grilling out, and catching up on old stories. Carter is Paul’s son. Maria is Mats’ daughter. Kim, Mats, and Paul were friends back in high school in northern Wisconsin in the early 80s and while Kim and Mats have stayed in touch they had both lost track of Paul a long time ago. It is just one of those stories how everyone reconnected a couple of years back when Helena, Maria’s sister, was randomly placed as an exchange student into the high school where Paul and Carter were teachers. It even made the national newsletter for the exchange program.
Monday I had lunch with Ashley, a former student and now friend, and we had a lovely time catching up on our lives before heading off to our respective errands and appointments.
Wednesday Kim invited some old friends from Home Campus for dinner. Linda, Nancy, and Marty came by and we made pizzas and sat out back and mostly talked of our various travels and the stories those inevitably provide until a gentle rain started and we had to go inside.
And on Thursday, our Swedish friend Maria came over for a couple of days. She’d been bouncing around the midwest for a bit – first to her former exchange host family in Indiana, then to a wedding in Minnesota, then to her sister’s former host family in Wisconsin, and then to us. We found out about this a couple of days in advance and of course you can come and stay with us why would you even worry about that!
Carter brought her here on Thursday night and we had a lovely evening hanging out in the back, grilling out, and catching up on old stories. Carter is Paul’s son. Maria is Mats’ daughter. Kim, Mats, and Paul were friends back in high school in northern Wisconsin in the early 80s and while Kim and Mats have stayed in touch they had both lost track of Paul a long time ago. It is just one of those stories how everyone reconnected a couple of years back when Helena, Maria’s sister, was randomly placed as an exchange student into the high school where Paul and Carter were teachers. It even made the national newsletter for the exchange program.
Kim has been grading AP exams all week, so on Friday Maria and I went to visit Lauren and Aleksia in Madison, where we had a lovely Peruvian lunch (they’ll skip the cilantro if you ask, but they’ll look at you like you’re defective for asking and maybe they’re right but I just don’t like cilantro) and then had ice cream on the terrace of the student union.
Later that night we were discussing a Swedish book I’d read recently on the recommendation of a friend (yes, I read it in translation, don’t be silly) called Anxious People by Fredrik Backman – a truly wonderful book which you should run out and read as soon as possible – and it turned out that not only has Netflix made a miniseries out of it but Maria was one of the extras! Of course we had to find her, and there she was on the far left in her red coat. Win!
After a quick visit to the local farmer’s market yesterday, where we ran into our friend Lois and learned all about what is happening at her barn now that we no longer have chickens there, I took Maria to the airport and off she went back to Sweden.
Some weeks are good weeks, and if there is a pile of grading staring at me right now that I didn’t get to when perhaps I should have, well, that’s just the price you pay for having friends.
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