Chapter 45

Johanna's turn:

Back from ten wonderful days in Norway. Spent some time living out of Great-uncle Jan's place. He's got a beautiful home up a mountainside above a fjord overlooking one of his shipyards in the distance. It's a little shipyard, and this is Norway where shipbuilding is part of the national psyche, so it counts as scenery, understand?

We did the touristy things, visiting museums and churches, seeing sights, absorbing the culture like a sponge.

Phone call. I looked at the display. Uncle Lars.

"Hello, Uncle Lars," I said.

"Hello, brilliant niece," he replied. "Where are you and your husband today?"

"Oslo. Walking around the old parts of town."

"Beautiful," he said. "Stoney said something about boating. I don't have a sailing boat at my immediate disposal, but I do have a cabin power boat, if you're interested."

"Hang on," I said. I turned to Stoney. "Uncle Lars has a power boat we can use. Interested?"

He didn't have to speak. I knew. "He's interested."

"I do hope you have a captain for it," Stoney said. "You people have entirely too many rocks in your water around here."

Uncle Lars laughed. "I understand. I've been to your Gulf of Mexico. It's such a mild place, except for the occasional storm. I would have been surprised if you had not asked."

We spent our day on the water. The boat was not one of those fiberglass consumer cruisers, it was a classic Norwegian fishing boat with a two cylinder diesel engine that didn't buzz, it pooted purposefully, pushing up and around the periphery of the fjord. The captain's name was Jan, pronounced almost like 'yawn', and when Stoney called him 'captain', Jan smiled broadly. "Understand it is American nice thing. I like, but am not captain. Just man and boat."

Jan had been working with Uncle Lars for forty years. He understood Stoney's love of the water and of boats and they talked for a while, then Stoney and I retired to the stern and lounged together and took in the sights.

Jan talked to us of his life on the water. Retired now, he'd been a captain for oilfield service boats in the North Sea, some of the nastiest waters in the world. Protected from the open seas and the winds that go with them, the fjord was idyllic, the scenery breathtaking.

"I love a coast where you have to look UP," Stoney said.

"I know," I said. "A lot different than Galveston Bay, isn't it?"

"In lots of ways," he said. "Cool. It's ninety-something in Galveston today. And here we're wearing sweaters."

I leaned back against him. "Maybe we need to work out a deal with Uncle Lars. Summer here. Winter in Texas."

"That's an interesting idea," he said. "But where do we work in some Alabama time?"

"Oh, I know. I got some jealous comments from our friends. And they want us down there soon." I did regular emails and the occasional Skype session with that bunch of lunatics in Alabama. There's a connection that I just can't seem to shake. Meeting them is second only to meeting Stoney in making ripples in my psyche.

Kara sent me a private email:

Johanna-

I don't want you to think I turned my back on you, sister. I'm in this whirlwind now. I thought I was going to be somewhat of an outsider, even though the whole bunch of us talked for weeks, but it's almost like this was a birthing.

I am loving my music. I have met with some of the music faculty at Auburn and they not only are working with me for the college experience, but I have integrated myself into the music at the Community, just like they said YOU did. Just walk in, whip out an instrument, and see what happens.

Anita and Maddie have gone home for the summer. I'm staying. I can't say, "I don't have a home." I have Dad, and honestly, Dad is more loving, caring and engaged since I moved away. Here, though, I have little sisters, Terri and Rachel, and I have big sisters, Cindy, Tina, Susan, Nikki, and my world-travelling sister, you.

I know life is a journey, not a destination, and I don't know what the future holds, but I am learning things that will color forever my path. You and Stoney are part of that, always.

When you decide that you're going to be back in Houston, let me know. I'm sure that I can make arrangements to be there to meet with you and Stoney.

Love always

Kara

"But I didn't DO anything special, baby," I told Stoney when I read the email to him.

"Sweet girl, sometimes what people need is for somebody to just be nice and normal."

I looked at my man, decent, honorable, caring. Sighed. "Have I been sheltered? Is the world really that screwed up?"

"The system is all about entropy. You're my little back current as the universe circles the drain."

"That's awfully dark, Stoney."

"Sometimes I look at everything and it is. Then I see my own personal spot of sunshine." He pulled me close and kissed me. "You."

"We have some good spots. Us. Mom and Dad. Uncle Lars. The Community."

"Yes, we pull back and look at all that. But to poor Kara, where she was when we met her, maybe she wasn't able to pull back. Maybe she was in the dark."

"How much of that was losses? Losing her mom. Her housekeeper friend. Those losses."

He sighed. "And I see a sensitive soul in her. Kind of fragile, in one sense."

All that conversation after a pleasant dinner in a restaurant in Oslo. A meticulously clean hotel room. An unfortunately small shower. And before lovemaking that had it been a painting, would have graced the wall of a museum.

I love my Stoney. I love what we do to each other. For each other. And two naked bodies, that's a part of marriage that words can't describe.

In some ways, though, my life is stressful.

"Rich girl problems," Stoney says when I talk about it. I'm supposed to be on the next step after college in the circle of life: career. Or more accurately for female ("You betcha! I checked!" Stoney says) me, career and motherhood. But we don't need that career part and the motherhood thing is two years away, per our discussion, unless I get some hormone surge and talk to Stoney.

"So find a place to play. You know you want to," Stoney says.

"You, sir, will be by my side at our next concert," I said. It's giggle-worthy. I started Rara Avis as almost a joke, but Stoney made business cards and they get passed around and now on a couple of Saturdays we've found ourselves in little musical venues where we take one of our frequent musical sessions, his banjo and my flute, and share it with an audience. That spot on the schedule is the main thing that keeps us from spending more time in Norway.

"I could like this place," Stoney says.

"So," I reply, "nothing keeps us from going back, spending a week or two or three, then coming back here. Uncle Lars says that fjord cabin is ours whenever we want it."

"So don't tempt me, redhead," he laughs. "I never planned to live my life as a jet-setting dilettante."

Giggle. "Silly Stoney, jet-setters bypass Norway. We'd need to go to Switzerland or the Mediterranean."

"Switzerland doesn't have an ocean, and the Mediterranean doesn't have fjords and this lovely weather. And if I do a couple more trips around the fjord, Jan says he'll sit on the dock and let us go out without him."

"Oh, noooo," I said. "I know what happens when you get me on a boat by myself." Giggle. "Really? He said that?"

"Yeah. I need to get used to the tidal flows and stuff. The swing isn't bad, but it's unfamiliar waters and the currents are goofy here."

"Not like the bay entrance back home?" I remember bucking the incoming tide. Our boat's eight-knot top speed erodes pretty fast under a two knot current pushing the other way. Sailboats like ours have a physical speed limitation. More wind, more power doesn't make you go faster when you hit a certain number. Ours was eight knots.

"No, I think it's like that, except I don't know the bottom and it's not nice, soft mud like home. These people are all about rocks."

"GPS," I said. "Electronic charts."

"You heard Jan when I said that."

"Yeah," I said, imitating Jan's raspy voice, "Stoney, is the sea. Know the sea. Know your boat. Know the shore. Here! In your head. GPS? She breaks! Then is you and the sea!"

"I can do paper charts," Stoney said. "I have the sense to pick my battles. Anchoring around here, though, that's another mess. At home, we just dropped the hook over the side and set it in the mud."

"Yeah, I know..." I'd washed a lot of that sticky black mud off myself, the anchor, and the boat on our weekends.

"Here ... rocks down there, too."

"Still..."

"And sailing? I'm thinking that's a 'no'. It's another variable to fight."

"One of those battles you choose, huh?" I replied.

"Get something like Jan's boat, except with a little cabin."

"Jan says that they, the fishermen, take boats like that out into the open sea all the time," I said.

"Yeah, they do. And every town along the coast has a statue in front of the church honoring the fishermen who never came back. Sea's serious stuff. North Sea's famous for eating people."