Autumn Leaves

It’s Sunday evening, the ninth of October, as I write this.  The Patriots are marching all over the Browns thanks to the 2016 debut of Tom Brady, who was suspended the first four games of the season (during which the Patriots went 3-1 anyway).  It’s cold and rainy outside.  There’s a fire in the fireplace.  It’s absolutely autumn.

That’s not how the month began.  It was glorious indian summer beginning the moment we returned from Oslo, as you saw in the previous post.  (And just to be clear, this is a mid-September to mid-October blog post, rather than a regular old calendar month blog post.)

I took Didi into Hareskov for her romp the afternoon of September 12th — Trine’s birthday — and it was still fully summerized.

Trine’s birthday was much more low-key than it ought to have been, but the girls’ cards were adorable:

(“Dear mom, big congrats on your 44th birthday!  I hope you’ve had a good day.  I love you!!!  Even though I sometimes hate you.  You should just know that I love you and always will.  Love, Molli.”)

(“Hi Mom!  Your birthday is to be wished as good as possible.  But anyway you always have a good birthday.  Love, Maddie.”)

Time continued apace, but it was so surreal I actually took a picture of the car info screen one late September afternoon:

27 degrees!  In late September!  In Denmark!  It just doesn’t happen!

And a gorgeous full autumn moon…

Didi’s walks were exceptionally pleasant, and gorgeous, for this time of year.

(Yeah.  That’s in our neighborhood, a ten-minute walk away.  Where do we live?)

Pokemon mania continues.  One lovely afternoon Maddie and I actually managed to “win” a gym for the very first time.

It was a major achievement, and Maddie’s pride was palpable.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, 3829 North Broadway is reduced to a mere memory (I couldn’t download the picture itself off Facebook because it wasn’t from a friend of mine, but a friend of a friend, so I just have the screengrab)…

The cradle of igLoo is no more.

Søren and Bodil came by for lunch one Saturday, and I just love this shot of Harald (on the floor), Dagmar, and Maddie.

On a weekend romp at “Puppy Lake” Didi and I discovered they’d installed a pier at the site of her old favorite swimming spot.  She seemed to have mixed emotions.

(The red thing hanging out of her mouth, which I thought at first was a ball or something she’d plucked out of the lake, is in fact her tongue.)

The summer weather was still with us, so we took advantage of it with the grill.

The American side of the family may not know this, but Molli and Maddie’s great-great-grandmother was the inventor of the bollemaskine (“bun machine”) in Denmark, and actually held a patent on it.  Here’s Mormor with her own grandmother’s invention in hand.

What the machine did was allow you to fill a tube with dough, then use its plunger to press out little bun blobs of dough — all the same size and shape.  It would have been a huge labor-saver at the time she invented it.

Mormor has been holding the machine and the patent for years, but this month she donated it to a woman’s museum in Jylland.  She made sure to share all the relevant historical documentation with all the family before handing it over, and I include that documentation here.

I’m either ashamed or proud to admit that at work I sometimes go out after lunch and do a little Pokemon hunting just to up my Maddie’s stats.  I managed to conquer a few gyms out on Langelinie, and I preserve the conquests here for Maddie’s benefit.

Of course, it isn’t just Pokemons running rampant all over Denmark.  Real fauna can also be found.

(That’s from an October walk along the lake with Didi.)

Maddie on a trip to Bymidten:

The big event of early October was my finally cashing in the 8-minutes of indoor free-fall I’d received as a 50th-birthday present.

I had hoped to share my minutes with Trine and Maddie (Molli Malou had a handball thing and couldn’t join us).  Unfortunately, the guy at the desk when we checked in said that wasn’t possible.  I should have let them know at the time I booked the reservation, he said.  I apologized and asked if we could reschedule, this time allowing for the split of minutes.  No, he said, because you can’t reschedule within 72 hours of a booking: it was simply too late, I would have to use all eight minutes myself.

“Oh,” I said glumly.  I had been building Maddie up for the adventure all week.

Maddie wrapped her arms around Trine and began to sob loudly.

“Um…” the man said, looking around nervously, “I tell you what: it’s against the rules, but as long as you promise not to tell anyone…”

Nice waterworks, Maddie!  We’re in!

It was a great adventure after all, but since I already shared the videos on Facebook, I’ll just drop the best photos here without further commentary.

Oh… and I got this in the mail:

I just noticed on a walk the other day that the little playhouse on the black playground has been removed.  If you browse back a few years you’ll find many, many pictures of Molli Malou and Maddie having the times of their lives in that little playhouse.  They’re both too old for it now, but its unannounced disappearance actually provoked a stronger emotional reaction in me than the tearing down of 3829 North Broadway.  Its absence in this picture is to me as obvious and weird as a missing tooth in a familiar smile:

But the kids don’t care: new ages, new pleasures.

# # #

I realize now there’s not a single picture of Molli Malou in this post.  That’s not by design.  The sad fact is that she’s almost never around in the course of daily life.  For one thing, she’s so well-covered in the previous post, and will be so well-covered in the next, I’m sure (there’s no handball for her in Portugal), that I don’t feel I’m omitting her excessively; for another. . .  well, there really is no other justification or rationalization.  I just have no picture of her in this batch.

You may all rest assured that she is, anyway, as lovely and dynamic as ever.  Her handball team, the Værløse U12 girls, are a veritable powerhouse, and she’s pouring all her energy into that — and doing very well at school.

Maddie is also doing very well at school, and is burning her own candle at both ends as well with swimming on Mondays and dance on Tuesdays and choir on Wednesdays — but she’s simply around more because she’s only seven and needs to be around more.

In less than 72 hours we’ll be in Portugal: we leave very, very early Wednesday morning and will be there ten days.  That vacation will surely deserve a blog post of its own, and, as mentioned, I have no doubt there will be plenty of Molli Malou in that.