8th August 2025, on the way to see the midnight sun
A long time ago there was a young woman sitting in a fishing village of forty or so people in Northern Norway. If you looked out to the sea, it would be a straight shot to Canada. The sun didn't set in summer and never rose in winter. It was a place of the aurora and the cod migrations.
She had a dream to be an artist and found her way to London where she fell in love with a man. He asked if she wanted to join him in his young and yet undefined country halfway across the world. She said 'yes'. At a seaside town, this time a tropical one, she worked on her craft and painted. She had two children with the man and brought them on the boat upriver to where the indegious people still lived. The western companies had convinced everyone there to not use mother's milk but their white powder instead. She fought hard to speak to as many people as possible to reverse this.
She kept on painting. A colleague of her husband came to watch her. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, leaning in and watching, silently. Later he would move to the capitol in the western part of the country, some hours by plane to set up a gallery. The woman from the north went to visit and came across a young family. A mother, a father and a baby son. They were the owners of the restaurant below the gallery and were doing the catering for the exhibitions.
Time passes and her kids grow up. Like a bird, the woman of the north returns to her fishing village whose population is now twenty. She builds a studio and in it spends the summers where the sun doesn't set and winters where the sun doesn't rise painting away. It is said the Queen knows of her work.
One day she gets a message from a friend of the gallery owner asking if she still lives in the village and if she is open to receiving guests. She says yes to both. A young man speaking her dialect introduces himself as the baby whose parents once ran restaurants in a life she onced lived.