As I sat at my desk, writing blissfully away about iPad apps - or was it tips for getting into shape for the summer? - my phone rang.

It was my friend the former punk rocker.

"Sarah Waters was here and I hugged her and gave her a book!" she said breathlessly into the phone. "I feel like one of those crazy fans."

It turns out that the author of one of my favorite books, Fingersmith, was in town for a special reading at Kulturhuset, and the former punk rocker's daughter not only went, she managed to get a 45-minute private interview with Waters for her blog Bookleaf.se. And of course she mentioned that she works at the Science Fiction Book Shop and that Waters should really check it out.

So my friend the former punk rocker, who is one of the managers there, wasn't completely surprised to see Sarah Waters wander into the store. But she did lose her cool - but only in the best way, all gushing and full of admiration.

"I'm a huge fan of yours," she told Sarah. "And I know you haven't read this and I think you'd like it, it's by John Ajvide Lindqvist, it's Let the Right One In. It's a present from me because you've given me so much because I love all of your books."

Sarah apparently is very kind and gracious and is completely unruffled by gushing fans.

"And you're the one who turned me on to her, " the former punk rocker said to me. "So I just had to tell you!"

I only wish that I had been there to gush, too.

The Swedish phrase for the day is förtjust i, which means to have a crush on.

And the ticker goes up a notch in the bio at the left. One more year to half a century.

The Swedish word for the day is fyrtionio. It mean forty-nine.

At last the ice has melted out by Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen, the ducks and coots and swans swimming and diving. Quite different from three weeks ago, when we took one of the ships overnight to Åland with the children's book author, the sea captain and the Australians.

Because of the unusually cold winter, the Baltic was all iced over and we wanted to see what it looked like out on the open sea. Of course the day before we left, some 50 boats had gotten stuck fast in the ice. But the sea captain assured us that we wouldn't get stuck.

"The boat is too big," he said. "It's made for seas full of ice like that. Besides, they wouldn't let us go if we were going to get stuck."

So on Friday afternoon, we boarded the boat with several hundred teenagers, bound for the island of Åland, which is all of 85 miles from Stockholm.

We took a look at our cabins, which were actually kind of charming with their round portholes and all the wooden detailing. Then we walked around the boat, checking out the tiny little pool, the various restaurants and the casino (well, slot machines anyway), the nightclub and the bar, where we had drinks and watched the city lights disappearing behind us.

We had dinner at about 8:30 or so, and about 9:15, as we were deciding whether or not to have dessert, an announcement came on the intercom telling us that due to recommendations from the authorities, we would not be going to Mariehamn in Åland for fear of getting stuck in the ice. The captain had set anchor and we would be spending the night where we were, returning to Stockholm the next afternoon.

"What?" we said all together.

You promised us we wouldn't get stuck, I said to the sea captain.

"We aren't stuck!" he tried to claim.

We were all terribly disappointed - and probably the only people on the whole boat who even cared since most people were there just for the cheap liquor. In fact, we were probably the only people who even noticed.

The next morning, when we got up, the sun was nearly blinding on the ice, and even if it wasn't the open sea, it was spectacular and terribly arctic.

As we looked out onto the snowy islands in the distance on either side, with people walking on the ice in between, I realized we were just outside Birds Island, where I've spent many a summer day. I could even see the very rocks where I sit every day at about 9:30 a.m., midway through my morning constitutional. In fact, if we'd wanted to, the husband and I could've actually gotten down off the boat and walked over the solid ice and spent the night there. If we'd wanted to.

Dammit. There I was, no further out in the archipelago than I'd ever been.

The Swedish word for the day is en förbannelse. It means a curse.

I dreamt I was pregnant. About three months pregnant, and I could feel the little fetus in me, a hard little knot twirling around in my gut. It was so strange, but a good thing. And then suddenly it was gone.I think it was a dream in sympathy with a friend who just had a miscarriage.

Or does it mean something else?

Do other men ever dream they are pregnant? Men whose wives aren't pregnant, I mean, which I imagine is common... or is it?

The Swedish word for the day is gravid. It means pregnant.

We stood in line to get on the bus to take us out on the tarmac at the airport on Gran Canaria - the Canary Islands sound so exotic to us Americans, who rarely know that they are the southernmost outpost of the European Union (though geographically they're part of Africa, sitting 100 kilometers west of Morocco) and the only part of the EU with guaranteed January temperatures in the 70s (Fahrenheit) and an ocean warm enough to swim in. Gran Canaria is a tourist trap, but a glorious one - long and wide beaches with pale sand blown over from the Sahara mixed with black volcanic sand, rugged mountains, even an old colonial capital with a certain charm. I guess the Canary Islands are Europe's equivalent to Florida. (Strangely enough, in tacky Playa del Inglés where we were staying, there is a shopping mall with sleepy little souvenir shops during the day and something like 20 gay bars at night - drag shows and leather bars and discos and pubs where they played show tunes. WTF? Fun, though...)

Anyway, we were standing in line, the husband, the children's book author, the sea captain and I, when a drunken bearded Swede started talking to the children's book author.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"How long have you been in Sweden?" he asked.

"What do you do for a living?" he asked.

"Do you have a condom?" he asked.

He told the children's book author he wanted to jerk off in the bathroom and didn't want to make a mess. He said he wanted to join the mile-high club. The children's book author didn't tell him that the mile-high club takes two - mere masturbation doesn't count towards membership.

Then he told the children's book author that he was very drunk because he's terrified of flying, and his girlfriend would be furious because he did crazy things when he was drunk.

"I have to pee really bad but I have VD so it really hurts," he told the children's book author.

All this in two minutes as we waited for the bus to take us onto the tarmac and to the plane that would take us back to Stockholm.

Once we got on the plane, the children's book author saw him go to the bathroom before we took off, and we tried not to think of him jerking off, or peeing painfully. A stewardess finally had to open the door to get him out, and the children's book author saw her brief look of disgust. "Don't use the bathroom on the left," he warned me.

When we got back to Stockholm, there was a foot of snow on the ground and it was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

"We should never go without a sunny and warm vacation in the winter ever again," the husband said to me.

Home, snowy home.

The Swedish word for the day is charterresa. It means charter trip.

Christmas has been swept out the door at last: the smell of oranges, cloves, saffron buns and sage stuffing, of hyacinth, pine branches and cold winter air, the glitter of glass and metal-filagree ornaments, the guests and the wrapping paper and finally, the tree all rolled up in a sheet, just like the victim it is, hauled out and dumped into the little plaza outside the city library with a bunch of other trees in various states of needledom.

It was the most yulish of Christmases in years: house guests for weeks, lots of dinners, lots of snow. Just the way I like it. And then we jaunted off to Oslo for a long weekend, where it was just as cold and snowy, and we hiked up and down icy hills all through the town, then had a glorious five-hour dinner fixed by a Frenchman and we danced in the new year, sweating and laughing in our fine clothes, swigging champagne until it was too much for me, and I had to go to sleep at 4:30, or was it 5:00?

But taking a long promenade through Stockholm today, after we'd taken down the tree, in the 2:30 p.m. dusk, with all the lights glittering in the windows and people walking on the ice of Lake Mälaren off of Kungsholmen and parents pushing their children in sleds down snowy hills in parks and a lone ferry making its way through the ice out into Stockholm Harbor, I realized: I miss having real winters. It seems to never get very cold, and we're lucky to have a total of two weeks of snow from the end of November to the middle of April. Strange to think that we are so far north, and yet it's a far milder climate than in Chicago. The truth of it is, the snow and cold make me happy.

So, how long will it last?

We've had nearly a month of it already. More than our fair share, it seems.

I'm keeping my cold fingers crossed.

The Swedish word for the day is vintertid. It means wintertime.

Are 21st century Americans the New Victorians?

A culture inordinately influenced by a wacked view of Christianity that values censure over love, exclusion over generosity and generally is mostly concerned about extending its power to control people’s lives? Check.

A squeamish prudery when it comes to the realities of sex? Check.

A belief that the country is not only blest by, um, “God” – but the country has the God-given right and duty to exert control over the rest of the world? Check.

A blind faith in the progress of business and industry – what’s good for business is good for the individual – yet science (read: evolution) is suspect? Check.

“Victorian” has always been a pejorative adjective in my books. I learned that from my mother and father, I suppose: my grandparents, three of whom were born when Queen Victoria was still alive (only my father’s father was born after her death), all suffered one way or another due to the Victorian values that they carried with them until they died. To me, Victorian means self-righteous, smugly pious, inhibited and stifling.

What brings this whole, well, facile comparison to mind is a recent reading of A.S. Byatt’s curious The Children’s Book, which puts a different spin on the original Victorians, (including a faddish adult love of children’s literature with one of the main characters a sort of less-successful 19th century J.K. Rowling I’d say). The book is all about Fabians and syndicalists, medievalists and suffragists, social reformers all. Victorian England wasn’t just a time of moral hypocrisy, it was a time of great upheaval. Which I suppose is true of our time as well. Although at this very moment, what’s happening in America regarding that issue closest to my heart, gay rights, makes me inclined to think that the moral hypocrites are winning.

Feh.

Will people look back a hundred years from now and think of us Americans the way I think of the 19th century English?

The Swedish word for the day is förträngning. It means repression.

If I lived close by, I would be a doting uncle. Or if I had lived close by when my nieces and nephews were little kids. Which most of them are not anymore. Take my oldest niece, of whom I am inordinately proud (well, I'm proud of all of my nieces and nephews - the cleverest, funniest, handsomest, prettiest, kindest and strongest kids in the world). My oldest niece has always had a will of her own, even from the time I first met her when she was only six weeks old and without even crying, she exerted an iron control over both her parents.

Anyway, instead of going to college when she turned 18, my niece decided to go to Bhopal, India for seven months, volunteering (inspired no doubt by my parents, who are the biggest do-gooders I know) with the community there that is still suffering the after-effects of a terrible disaster when a Union Carbide factory blew up. She's written about going inside the long-abandoned factory - a disturbing tale - and about the difficulty in getting proper compensation from Dow Chemical (which owns Union Carbide) for those in Bhopal still affected by the explosion.

And now, my niece wants me to get the word out that this week in Stockholm you can learn more about how to help at the Bhopal Bus (times and places at the link), a traveling informational exhibition manned by volunteers trying to raise awareness of the tragedy, which happened 25 years ago.

So, this one's for you, my dear niece. May you succeed in making the world a better place.

The Swedish word for the day is katastrof. It means catastrophe.

I'm on youtube.

While sitting on the train with the husband, a family got on and sat next to us, parents, teenaged stepson, and a toddler and a baby together in one of those unwieldy double strollers. I looked at the sleeping toddler's mittens: tiny, brightly colored, with a repeated design of skulls. How odd, I thought, that this memento mori has become such a popular pattern for the clothes of small children.

Was it started with irony - dress your two-year-old in goth death metal biker style with a big old wink - or is it a distant reflection of our warlike times? Or did it just filter down, with little kids demanding to have the same things that the big kids have?

More, I wonder if it gives parents pause to pull a wailing baby into a little green onesie patterned with skulls? I want to know if it feels odd to show off this squirming bundle of your genes and proof that life just goes on and on, with a nasty reminder that death gets us all in the end. I guess a hundred years ago and more, when the chances of making it to your third birthday were far slimmer than today, no one bothered with skull patterns since children were a reminder in and of themselves that death gets us all in the end.

As for today, well, we're so removed from death these days that the image of a skull is really nothing more than a fashion statement. I would be surprised if any parents gave any of this a second thought.

But it never fails to startle me.

The Swedish word for the day is ben. It means bone or bones as well as leg or legs.

We went to see Julie & Julia last night with the girl from LA and her boyfriend. The movie opened yesterday here up in the far north. As every person I've spoken to, every review I've read, says: Julia good; Julie, um, not so good. But the husband came back from the gym this morning and I caught him in the kitchen, making an omelet, Julia-style, shaking, shaking, shaking it in the pan.

"It didn't really work" he said. "I did it wrong at the beginning so it stuck."

Plus he put tabasco sauce on it, decidedly un-Julia.

"It's good anyway," he said.

The Swedish word for the day is omelett, which surprisingly means omelet. An interesting fact, however is that when Swedes want a smile for the camera, they say "omelet," which gives a decidedly more subtle and less radiator-grill-like result.

How old is too old to be out dancing until 4 a.m.?

I am proof in the flesh that 48 is not too old. And we are not talking wimpy dancing, either. I got all sweaty and soaked, in my t-shirt and green suspenders, shaking every part of my body hard and fast.

We were just coming off of a dinner of saffron curry chicken and fried bread and homemade coconut ice cream with cardamom caramel sauce for dessert. Not so heavy going, despite the sound of it. The girl from L.A. had at last moved to Stockholm (well, not at last – she’d been here for a month but we were all absorbed in marrying off the children’s book author and the sea captain) so we were celebrating.

“Welcome,” the husband toasted to her and her boyfriend, and all 11 of us raised our glasses. "Here's to the first of many dinners."

Absolutely, I thought to myself.

So we talked and ate, each group having its own conversations, discussing everything from Maira Kalman - the girl from L.A. went to a knitted hat party at her house! - to getting lost in the Ikea at Kungens Kurva, and the insanity that is shopping at Ikea on a Saturday, to the stripey goodness of her boyfriend's socks (I forced him to come and look at all our stripey socks in the newly refurbished dressing room at the back of the apartment.)

Then, at about 12:30, we all put on our coats and trooped out to go to some club where the pop star was playing, except when we got there push had come to shove, shove, shove as we stood around listening to the tunes being spun, being so manhandled and elbowed by the crowd that our little group nearly imploded.

"Someone pinched my ass," the boyfriend of the girl from L.A. said.

"Was that you, Francis?" the children's book author said.

I denied it.

"Well, I wouldn't have minded if it was Francis, at least I know him," the boyfriend of the girl from L.A. said.

Then some girl tried to pick him up. That is totally un-Swedish I said. I told him it must be his naturally curly hair that was attracting all the attention. Then we left for some new gay club that's opened up, near Norrlandsgatan. Push had not come to shove there, thank goodness. Push hadn't even come to push yet, although at least one of the dance floors was pleasantly packed. It was there that we ended the night.

The Swedish phrase for the day is klockan fyra på morgonen. It means four in the morning.

When we rushed into the liquor store down the street - Sweden's alcohol monopoly Systembolaget, of course - I scoffed at the husband for buying six bottles of South African shiraz. Then when La Francaise, who is visiting from Oslo with her husband, the Belgian, insisted on paying for the bottles, I told her that's not fair to her since we'd never end up drinking all the bottles at the upcoming dinner. We're only seven, I reminded her.

Silly me.

We're all borderline alcoholics in this country, and I guess we needed all six bottles, plus one purchased the previous day, to wash down the turkey molé I made (the easy version, which only took three hours. I hate to imagine how much time and effort it takes to make the Mexican classic chili pepper and chocolate sauce that is authentic molé), rice and beans and fried plantains and avocado-with-fresh-corn salad.

Somehow, towards the end of the meal, after the coffee and the homemade dulce de leche ice cream, the children's book author and La Francaise and I got onto the subject of song lyrics. The question was: What exactly are good song lyrics?

"You know," said La Francaise, "It sounds really weird but sometimes I like Eminem. You know that song about his mother and cleaning out his closet? The lyrics are really good."

The children's book author nodded. "I think "If I were a Boy." It's actually pretty deep when you think about it. Beyoncé. She's hot."

I was smart enough not to actually do it, but I came dangerously close to saying that in the old days, lyrics were better.

What about "Both Sides Now," I asked. Can you recite any of the lyrics to Beyoncé or Eminem? I think you should be able to recite good lyrics word for word, I said. And I proceeded: Flows and flows of angel's hair, and ice cream castles in the air, and feather canyons everywhere...

I think I botched the lyrics about then, but neither La Francaise nor the children's book author noticed.

"Sure, but that's folk music," the children's book author said. "It's all about the words and they're so sing-songy."

Folk music? Joni Mitchell, a folk musician? I was aghast. But really, I couldn't accurately describe her music, other than to say that it was pop music when it came out at least, in the early 1970s.

The children's book author wasn't buying it.

"Folk," he said. "She's folk. You can't convince me."

And really, I couldn't.

Was it the bottle of wine I'd consumed?

But I found myself wondering, what exactly is wrong with folk music anyway? Why do I bristle at someone describing Joni Mitchell that way? When did folk musician become such a horrible way to describe someone? When did folk become a dirty word?

And the big question remained unanswered: How do you define good song lyrics?

The Swedish phrase for the day is en flaska per person. It means one bottle per person.

p.s. for Swedish readers and those wanting to test just how much Swedish they've actually learned here the hard way, I've been interviewed briefly by Micke for the gay blog aggregator site www.gaybloggar.se.

I always consider myself to be in fair health, psychologically speaking. Just enough angst to not be terribly lazy. High in empathy, yet not altogether unselfish. A bit stodgy around the edges but basically fairly unrepressed. I credit it to having had a pretty easy life with little in the way of trauma, all things considered.

And then I go on a binge and I realize: OCD is me.

To whit my current, um, frozen dessert obsession. I contemplated buying an ice cream freezer for weeks before I finally stopped in at the nearby hardware store at lunch late last month. For dinner with C. the fashion photographer, I was determined to make rhubarb ice cream from a few stray stalks sitting in the refrigerator that needed to be used up before we went to New York.

What I didn't reckon for was that the metal canister of the machine needed to sit in the freezer for 24 hours, rather than the six hours I had until dinner time. It ought to work anyway, I told myself. But when the manufacturer says 24 hours, it turns out they really do mean 24 hours. And so we had cold rhubarb soup for dessert - creamy and delicious, with a hint of cinnamon and a little tang of sour cream, but soup nonetheless.

An inauspicious beginning, I thought, but it turned out not to be so. When we arrived in New York several days later, not only did my brother have an ice cream freezer, properly frozen, but I was able to find sour cherries in Manhattan to make sour cherry sorbet.

Then there was the night I fixed the gingery chicken and scallion pancakes for everyone - all of us adults and kids alike sitting in my brother and sister-in-law's living room - and I made pink grapefruit sorbet for dessert, which seemed vaguely Thai-ish. (Is grapefruit and crab salad Thai, or Vietnamese?)

Now I was on a scallion pancake and frozen dessert craze. Scallion pancakes with spicy cold melon soup and soba noodles, with fresh ginger ice cream for dessert, then scallion pancakes with soba noodles, with green tea ice cream for dessert, both rather delicate but, I have to admit, delicious. Oh, and at some point in there, for our friends visiting from Norway, I managed to make white nectarine sorbet, which comes out pale pink it turns out, and is best served right away to get the maximum flavor, rather than freezing it longer to make it harder.

But the upshot, really, is that sometimes being OCD is a good thing, to be honest. No one is complaining yet, that's for sure.

So, what should the next flavor be?

The Swedish word for the day is glass, which means ice cream and shouldn't be confused with glas, which means glass, as in both the material and something you drink from.

O great mystery that crowded, dirty and expensive Manhattan can feel at W. 89th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue at 7:30 a.m. on a weekday summer morning so new and full of promise. All those endless leafy blocks of brownstones leading to Central Park. The park itself a green rectangle battened down and secured in place at its edges by high rises with terraces and roofs copied from French chateaus or Greek temples or Egyptian monuments or Spanish cathedrals or Roman forums. Or roofs of simple solid geometry.

I know I'm shamelessly romanticizing the place in my elitist way (easy to do as we never make it to any poorer neighborhoods), idly purchasing suspenders on the snootier end of Bleecker Street or strange white Japanese robot monkey things in Soho, or drinking tequila cocktails and talking a mile a minute with the divine Lisa Lucas in the East Village, or snarfing down delicious Chinese steamed buns filled with fatty caramelized pork at a jammed Momofuku (not to mention the short-cake-flavored ice cream) on a Tuesday night or wandering breezily around the Cloisters with my dear sister and sister-in-law and niece and nephew while the husband with his Spanish blood notes: "Every other thing was stolen from Spain it looks like!"

But really, living in New York is tight both in space and money, and in truth, full of the same drudgery as living anywhere else.

So why does it seem so exciting, so much better than anywhere else?

O great mystery that returning back from New York I somehow love Stockholm even more than when I left. Our apartment! So airy and grand and white and full of light as I sit reading on a sofa at 3:30 a.m. on account of the jetlag, the sun fully up and flooding the apartment. The streets! So rooted and charming on a human scale, never far from a glimpse of the water. The ethos! Circumspect rather than brazen with everything hanging out and in your face, elbows and tongues well-sharpened.

Still. What I wouldn't give to have both New York and Stockholm.

The Swedish phrase for the day is välkommen åter. It means, more or less, come back soon.

The second pin of the two pins on which the Swedish year is wrapped - Christmas is the first - has arrived: Midsummer. Pagan holiday made half-Christian, it used to be tied to St. John's Day, which is June 24. Which would put it precisely six months after Christmas Eve, when Christmas is celebrated in Sweden. Very symmetrical, very orderly. Very Swedish.

Tomorrow we're off for the weekend, going out to the archipelago to the country house of the children's book author and the sea captain. Bearing salmon and caviar torte, strawberry rhubarb pie and 20 tiny bottles of Norwegian schnappes.

We almost always go to Birds Island for midsummer, to the country home of C. the fashion photographer and A. the TV producer. But after 14 years together, they are going their separate ways.

Strange how someone else's separation can tear one apart.

The holiday will be bittersweet, despite the strawberry rhubarb pie, even with whipped cream on the side.

The Swedish word for the day is skilsmässa. It means divorce.

We were late for lunch yesterday as the husband and I left the Matteus school where we had just cast our votes for seats in the EU parliament. On our way out, a tiny old woman - in her late 80s I would say - walked up on her way in to vote, leaning heavily on a cane. Three political workers stood in front of her, one each from the Green party, the People's party and the Moderates (I would describe the People's party as, um, maybe, populist and it is part of the center-right alliance currently ruling Sweden, which is headed by the Moderates).

The old woman looked up, and barked out: "Pirate party?"

The husband and I looked at each other. The Pirate party is a brand new entity. They are interested in one thing: free file sharing on the internet.

"I guess she downloads a lot," the husband said, and we laughed.

And so the Pirate party ended up winning one of the 17 seats that Sweden has in the EU Parliament.

Oh, the power of the internets.

The Swedish word for the day is val, which has been the word of the day before. It means election. (And as Vatine has pointed out, also means choice as well as whale.)

My last meal would be a crabcake. Who knew? Not me, at least not until I was confronted with Ganda's question.

The Swedish word for the day is sista måltid. It means last supper.

We arrived late because it took us forever to iron our shirts - mine lavender, the husband's powder blue - and to pull on our trousers - mine khakis, the husband's black jeans - and our black suit jackets. Then we had to shove our feet into our shoes - mine marine corps black lace-up boots circa 1968, the husband's Paul Smith black trainers with those little multi-colored stripes on the sides. Then we scrambled into a taxi, which took us out to one of the la-di-da suburbs of Stockholm, where we had dinner at the only local watering hole, which was filled with people who were dressed, well, like me. Except for the shoes of course.

"It's the uniform out here," our hostess told us, as we sat drinking sancerre and eating fish.

She should know, she lives just up the road.

Everyone in the place was, like us, about to go to the same birthday party. Captains of industry they were, the movers and shakers of Stockholm: a bunch of 60-year-old white men. And their wives of course, who unlike the men were decked out in their finest dancing clothes, their heels staggering, their hair freshly colored and cut, their nails newly manicured.

Once we'd finished the wine and the fish, we made our way over to the house, where the party was going full-swing. With one of the daughters of the man of the house leaning on my arm and the husband in front of me, we squeezed our way into the crowd, air-kissing the birthday girl. After which I was promptly way-laid by a strange woman babbling in English.

"It's your fault we never see her," she crowed. "You keeping her pregnant all the time!"

I smiled a rigid smile, all lips and teeth and no eyes at all, and nodded at her without saying a word before grabbing the husband and pushing my way further into the din, grabbing a glass of champagne and downing it.

And so the party went.

"Wouldn't you like to have a house like this?" the husband asked all wistful-like late in the evening after we'd been dancing, as he always does in this kind of situation.

No, I told him. He would hate it, make no mistake. The homogeneity, the rigidity, the disapproval, the conservatism.

It's my 16-year-old suburb-loathing self that rose up out of the 48-year-old me to say this. But really, the 16-year-old and the 48-year-old me's are in total agreement in this case. And having grown up there, both the me's know whereof I speak.

It would be dreadful to live out there, I said. But it's fun to be a tourist every once in awhile.

The Swedish word for the day is förort. It means suburb, of course.

I lived in Barcelona once. I left behind a job and apartment in Washington, and with the money I'd gotten from my ex for the house we'd owned together in Dupont Circle, I took an eight-month vacation, travelling here and there for nearly two months - Amsterdam and Paris, London and Berlin, Vienna and Budapest and Lucca, a week or so in each place. I ended up in Barcelona, staying for six months.

This was in the day of the peseta, and Barcelona was cheap. You could buy two kilos of tomatoes, two kilos of oranges, a couple onions, a dozen eggs and a wedge of cheese for about $2.50. I rented a room in the Eixample Dret not far from the Sagrada Familia, paying about $100 a month to Edu, a crazy Argentinian, who became my closest friend.

It was the strangest time of my adult life, those six months in Barcelona.

I loved it and loathed it, it was a trial to be so outside the culture and so alone and so purposeless. But Barcelona has endless charms that I couldn't help but be taken by. There is no place I feel stronger about. It is tied to the great crux of my life - meeting the husband and leaving behind the States.

When the husband and I returned last week for the first time in ten years, it all came rushing back: the smells, the light, the special tiles of the sidewalks, the cutoff corners at every intersection, the plane trees, the peculiar reticence of Barcelonans, the late dinners and later dancing, the alternately sluggish and hectic pulse of the place.

I missed terribly my friend Edu, who died nearly seven years ago. I couldn't even admit to myself that I was sad and a bit prickly and feeling very vulnerable and raw, as if I had suddenly reverted to the self I was when I lived there, on my long vacation.

Funny how a place can turn a crank in one's heart, ratcheting everything up, notch by notch by notch.

Stranger still, none of this was apparent until I sat here to write it all down.

The Swedish verb for the day is att återkomma. It means to return.