Tuesday Hania and drove out to IKEA to get a duvet for our bed. I had been a strict sheet-and-quilt man for most of my life, despite four years spent in Europe, but a recent stay in a New York apartment, owned by a Polish woman, convinced me of the superiority of the duvet. There is no sheet to get tangled, no bother with layers, just one light but insulating cover. It makes getting in and out of bed, which I do with more frequency as I get older, infinitely easier.
Not surprisingly, there was a large selection of duvets, each with a painted thermometer on the plastic packaging to show its degree of warmth. We got the second warmest. Then we chose a cover: white with a series of black geometrical designs.
It was only when we got home, and put the duvet in the cover, and then on the bed, that I noticed that the black lines, overlapping and repeated, were of the Dala horse, the most famous piece of Swedish folk art. (It is to Sweden what the Barcelos rooster is to Portugal.) I recognized it because we had one in our house when I was growing up – brought by a Swede on a Rotary Club exchange – and years later, I spent Midsummer in Dalarna, the central region of Sweden from which the horse comes (like much of the country’s folk art). The design made the duvet even more welcome.
I'm on deadline this month; blog posts will resume in July. Thanks for reading.
I went to All Saints Sunday for Pentecost and was greeted warmly at the door. Leaving, I was also approached and thanked for coming. ‘They’re looking for younger parishioners,’ I thought to myself. Then I remembered my age.
Went to visit a friend yesterday who’s been having a tough time of it lately; his wife, suffering from Alzheimer’s, had to enter a memory care facility. He says he’ll wake up at 3 a.m and read a few pages of Seneca and that helps him immeasurably.
A good friend of mine at the Sun-Sentinel, who went on to write obituaries at the Washington Post, used to muse about writing a book on all the illustrious people who have died in Florida.
The latest and perhaps most surprising name to be added to that long list is that of Martin Amis, who died this past weekend in – get ready for it – Lake Worth. Neither the front page obituary in the New York Times, nor the AP obituary buried deep within the Sun-Sentinel, explained how the English author of The War Against Cliché ended up, like so many septuagenarians, in the Sunshine State.
We’re still eating breakfast on the balcony, which overlooks the parking lot where, for the last year and a half, a container has served as the office for the construction crew. The men gather in the morning, in their hats and long-sleeved shirts, drinking coffee and joking in Spanish, and then head off to their various labors. This morning, stepping outside, I felt a powerful urge to sing “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.”