Vallanes, Egilsstadir, Iceland

It´s been a while.

With a 32 kb dial up connection, and Icelandic keyboard, and a bon fire starting soon, I don´t think I could cover all of the goings on since my last post, so I´ll just say life is good.

Worked late today packing mushrooms we hunted in the bit of forest near the farm along the road out to the lake. Eymunder found a beer in the cooler and told the few of us who stayed after to help that we´d better do something about it, so we had a spot of beer as we cleaned and bagged the last of them. Mushroom hunting suits me, I think. It would seem to be a solitary sport in which you find yourself kneeling in small gullies lost in a forest rooting around through the grass looking for just the right shapes and colors. Plenty of time to think. Or, better, not think. Time to give the brain a rest, to enjoy the way you can see clear to the mountains on a sunny day like today. To enjoy that you never believed Iceland really got hot enough to walk about in a tank top and then there you were having your way with weeds and clipping kohlrabi before lunch in just that.

This farm is magical, by the way. You could tell even just getting in to Eymunder´s car the first day that this was going to be exactly right, just as the rest of Iceland has been. Dangling your feet off the northern most Icelandic island for and after lunch postcard writing session on Grimsey, having crossed officially into the Arctic Circle. Something to write home about, to be sure.

I feel like I´m actually here. Which isn´t a sensation I have often. Usually floating above myself or in a corner somewhere, but here I feel present, ready for a new start like many of us here.

Tomorrow is Sunday, our day off. Not sure yet what we´ll get up to. It could be anything from hitchhiking to town to catch the bus to Seyðisfjöður to hiking to a nearby waterfall to taking a walk out to the lake. Even taking a final few laps through the mud, past the barley fields and potatoes to the beets or up through the horse pasture, along the woods, and back to the Monster House sounds nice.

But now it´s time for a bon fire.