frankfurt goodbyes

Driving through Germany – early morning – en route to Frankfurt Flughafen for my flight to the USA! I’m surprisingly calm. Was für ein Uberraschung! Was für ein Geschank! Ich dachte, dass ich nervös fühlen wurden. Aber nein! Ich fuhle sehr glucklich und wir machen Spaß! I spent the morning writing my journal entry in…

Danish wedding vows

Welcome to Copenhagen City Hall. My name is Thune Lindberg. I am the registrar and will be performing the marriage ceremony today. You have contacted the Copenhagen City Hall for the purpose of entering a civil marriage, and your wish to marry will now be confirmed before the public authorities. Prior to the marriage, I…

my painted bridesmaids

                            My painted bridesmaids are lined up on the wall behind us. They’ve come all the way from the Scandinavian folk ballad “Young Svejdal” to grace our wedding in their flowing gowns. I imagine that they bathed, perfumed, coifed, and powdered me,…

elevator of the gods

I spotted this quizzical sign next to an elevator in the Copenhagen town hall, just minutes before our wedding.  Only 300 KG’s worth of gods are allowed to ride the elevator at once. In Danish “gods” means “goods” – so it’s a service elevator for the waitstaff – but I prefer to think of the…

we are made of words

A wonderful image from ‘Edition Poshette’ that I picked up in Florence and tucked into my journal. I’ve always imagined our thoughts as poems that swirl around us like auras or ornamentation, the words merging in the spaces between us to create serendipitous trellises of meaning where one person ends and the other begins; line…

written on the earth

Sean wrote this the day before our wedding in Copenhagen: …and this while I did research in the Volkskunst Museum in Vienna two years ago, while he waited in a park nearby:

our wedding announcement

Sean and I are getting married in Copenhagen on November 16th, 2015, in just a week! We’re driving north through Germany, a 2-day road trip that will bring us through our old home in Germany. It’s an elopement that’ll take place in the lovely old city hall – but our real wedding will take place…

forever: fifty reasons

On Sean’s 50th birthday in August he came home to a sign on the door and a lemon tart and ‘happy birthday’ spelled out in flour on the countertop, and a kitchen strung with bunting – 50 triangles – one for each year of his life, and on each one a reason why I love…

italian – english language exchange

My new Internations friends and I met for a language exchange in the breezy upstairs loggia of the Biblioteca dell Oblate at the end of September. The library is a 12th-century monastery turned hospital turned library, and it’s just a 5-minute walk from my apartment in Santa Croce. This is one of my favorite places…

love notes tied to my body

Just 6 sleeps until my love flies from Oxford to Florence to carry me across the threshold of four or five countries, then marry me. We’ll be in Denmark for a week before we get married, too – our honeymoon will come before the nuptials. Everything is in reverse, but who cares? It’s all lovely!We,…