Entering our third month of Sheltering-in-Place here in Seattle, I locate myself in the week by when I last showered: I showered today, I showered yesterday, I can’t remember when I showered or that’s really a funky smell. My hair has entered a new length division where it now looks reasonably good.

I love hearing what projects people have embarked upon to stay sane. Puzzles are popular. A friend brought over a bag of eight. I have a box of six to go out. Thousand piece puzzles. We aren’t slouches.

My friend Kay has been sorting her house from top to bottom, something she’s been talking about doing for years. The difficulty with sorting is that you have to be willing to get rid of things. That’s been her problem. I told her I’d take the cookbooks, look through them and then put them in my Little Free Library. She and her daughter turned up, masked, with a hand truck and 12 boxes and bags of books. I hauled them onto the parking strip until it rained.

I thought that by now I would have improved my piano technique and learned to sing whole operas. I’ve instead been spending hours in the garden—that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning—and apropos to nothing in my life–learning Swedish.

It all started with the Kavanaugh hearings last fall, which left me disheartened, depressed and disgusted. I wanted to go somewhere far away from everything that is American. I subscribed to MHZ, the international streaming service that provides foreign language films to Americans who never mastered a second language and need the subtitles.

I watched all the French films and television series first because French is the language I know best after English. I watched a lot of the German ones because I had been trying to up my German in order to sing lieder more easily.

Then I discovered Swedish television. It was the peculiarity of what I watched first that gave me the sense of Sweden being a place where everyone is blond and outdoorsy and it’s always mid-summer. Beyond that I loved the sound of the language. It was musical. It had soft edges unlike German. It had less mouth noise than French. Its vowels were Italianate.

For months, I went through all the Swedish films on MHZ. I’d tell my neighbor Bill I was watching Swedish films and we’d smile. Both of us remember a time when a “Swedish film” putatively meant pornography in the U.S. (Remember the pother around “I am Curious Yellow?”)

Enter Karin. I first knew Karin when she brought an elderly charge to sing with All Present. We began trading my watercolor class for her Rubenfeld synergy work. Then private music for Swedish language lessons.

Karin is a retired physician from Sweden; she wasn’t sure she could teach the language. That didn’t matter to me. I learn best when I can just ask questions. So that’s how we started. How do you say hello, thank you, I am, you are, what’s your sign? That sort of thing.

Karin grew up in a small Swedish town called Nora. I looked it up on Google maps. It looks a charming little place up country from Stockholm. In my research, I learned that a woman named Anna Maria Roos wrote a little poem about Nora in 1909 that became a well-known children’s song: Tre Små Gummor:

Tre små gummor skulle gå en gång
Till marknaden uti Nora.

The song says that three little old ladies once went to market in Nora.“We’re going to have fun, ride the carousel, eat caramel and frolic all day in Nora.”

I thought how fun (roiligt)! I would learn the song and surprise Karin with it. I found the music and was confronted with more Swedish than “hi, how are you.” So I found children singing it on YouTube. For two days I listened to Swedish children, puppets and farmors with guitars singing about the tre små gummor, which are the three little old ladies, but for the longest time existed in my mind as three small goobers. I’d get on the trampoline my friend Eileen gave me and put on the three small goobers. Or out in the garden, I’d say to myself, let’s see how much of three small goobers you’ve got memorized.

Finally I sang it to Karin and she was (appeared) delighted. The song has become my reference point for pronunciation. I know how to pronounce the e in tre, the u in skule and the o in Nora. If I can keep my wits about me I can pronounce other words with those vowels. Any sound from the three small goobers transfers. It’s one of the wonders of music

I do find the language musical. I draw quarter notes and eighth notes above syllables to help me get the emphasis in a word or the melody in a phrase.

Which reminds me of another reason I am attracted to the language. All the Swedish religious songs are about nature and the beauty of the world and the tunes and melodies are beautiful. Swedish people sing about the stars in the winter. At the end of April they sing goodbye to winter and welcome the spring. They don’t appear to be washed in the blood of the lamb as I was growing up. It’s aways mid-summer and they are always eating caramel and frolicking in Nora.