scandinavian tile

My host has Scandinavian taste and I love her house. The green river falls past the end of the garden. In my early twenties I visited and she and I ran down and flung ourselves in, again and again, fetching up winded downstream against the gravel island, hanging onto branches. You walked all the way back up the path and plunged back in. That was summer. The living room is populated with artefacts from an adventurous life. The upstairs office has rifles, a hammock, old round-shouldered business cards tacked to the corkboard with extra digits penciled in front of each telephone number. The whole house is filled with swimming trophies, and pennants for tennis. Her son was born in Africa and her daughter in Kalimantan. “I think we helped destroy the rainforest,” said my friend sadly, the first night I arrived when we were reminiscing about Indonesia, our lost homeland. She loves yellow and orange and the kitchen and bathroom are tiled in exuberant 70s clay, handmade tiles, each one of which is different to its neighbour. There is a photo of me and my two brothers and her daughter, average age six or seven, taking a bath together in a maze of these tiles, so small and the white bathtub so generous that it was intimate yet not crowded.