There are strange, bright-red, birds singing outside my window. Most probably on their way south.

Even though it is warm, I know that fall will be coming soon. I can feel Nature, heavy with her burgeoning fruits and unfolded flowers, slowing down her frenzied run through the summer. Pausing to catch her breath. Her pulse slowing. The fever subsiding.

Preparing for days of darkness and slumber.

I woke up this morning, thinking how fortunate I am. Which is intersting in itself, because my last thought as I was falling asleep last night was how miserable I felt during the weekend while trying, with little effect, to ease the suffering of my sick, little girl.

I used to have this little List of things I would check in my mind, when I felt really down. It has been quite a while, probably years, since I saw fit to do The List the last time, but there have been dark times in my past when I needed to do it daily, even many times a day. The List changes obviously, as life goes by, but currently goes something like this:
- I was born into as normal a family as any,
- in a peaceful country with few crimes and no wars,
- was brought up in a sane and non-abusive manner,
- have never gone without food or love for any length of time,
- have found my partner for life,
- am blessed with true friends,
- am healthy and wish others well,
- have so far achieved the education that I have sought,
- am successful in the work that I have chosen to do,
- do not have too much money or things, but enough, and
- have been entrusted with the most precious little girl in the World.

Sometimes I can't check some of the things on The List. I may not have had any money. At all. Or seemed to be about to flunk out of school. Or something. But the big things have always been there. Family, friends, love.

I may not have had any special reason to do The List this morning. But it was good to remember it. One shouldn't just pray when things are bad.

Man, that was one tough weekend.

Not that I had any lack of respect for people with young kids, especially single parents. But holding your little girl in your arms for a weekend, while she sobs and cries from feeling just miserable, and not being able to do much about it, that just amplifies the awe I am in of those that have more than one toddler to take care of, let alone for those that are doing this by themselves.

This is probably the best job on Earth. But it's a tough one, too.

Being useful is calming. When you need to become the pillar of strenght, it just seems to happen naturally.

It has almost been a week since I came back home. Being away for three weeks was too long, and its effects were apparent. My wife, a tough cookie herself, was completely exhausted from trying to balance a heavy workload with taking care of our little girl. She just started a new rotation, which means that she is up at 5 am and out the door, and is seldom seen back home until after 7 pm. And she is also taking calls again. For example today, she was off to work at 7 am, and won't be back until noon tomorrow. Having probably gotten no sleep at all.

I can admit to having been a bit sleep-deprived myself when I came home last Sunday night, but it is interesting how you can suddenly gain extra strength just from seeing that your force is in demand. So I have spent the week waking up with my wife and seeing her off, getting a couple of hours worth of work done before my daughter wakes up, feeding/dressing/brushing her teeth and driving her to the daycare, paying bills, haggling with oil people/phone people/repair people, getting the cars maintained, studying, stocking the fridge/pantry, working some more, fetching my little girl and playing with her, buying flowers/wine/other distractions for my wife, making dinner, feeding and nourishing my wife, bathing my girls and putting them to bed, and maybe getting a little more work done.

And I've done it. Calmly and completely. Because I am wanted. And needed. By a couple of people that live in my heart. One of them moved there a decade ago. The other one just appeared there last summer. Yesterday, I was struggling with the question 'Can you miss something you've never actually had?' Today I realized that of course you can. If you realize that it is something you have wanted for longer than you have known. My little girl, for example. Being apart from her for a few days soon after she was born made me miss her like crazy. Even if we only just met. Missing her was also missing the opportunity to get to know her better. To verify what I felt she was like. Or maybe learning something completely different about her. This was the challenge of being away from her, these last few weeks. It is the loss of time. Seeing it disappearing without being there to spend it with her.

But now I am back. And I am making good things happen. My daughter greeted me as if I had been away for only a few minutes, and I hope she didn't feel this sting in her heart that comes from missing dearly. But I secretly also want to believe that she missed me, a bit. Just a little. Isn't that the essence of human relations? You do not just want to enjoy the company of other people. You also want to know that it is reciprocated. That there is balance. That you are not just feeding on others, but that they are getting good things in return from you.

This may be my single, greatest dread about my little girl growing up, besides her becoming a 'socially conservative' Repulican. It is that she will not derive the same pleasure from my company as I do from hers. Which actually is pretty likely, eventually, I guess, even inevitable. I even want her to outgrow me, and us, her parents. But I know it is going to break my heart when she starts trying to break free.

Oh, listen to me! How silly. Worrying about her moving out, when she has barely moved in. As I am writing this, she is sound asleep after a challenging night and morning. Late last night, she woke up and started crying. Something she practically never does during the night. When I checked on her, she was miserable. Eyes red and puffed, nasty cough, and what a runny nose! How can such a little thing produce so much snot?

She woke up a few more times in the night, and each time I put her right back to sleep. My wife took her with her downstairs for breakfast before she left, but the little critter hardly ate anything. She spent most of the morning whimpering pathetically in my arms, eating and drinking a little from time to time, finally collapsing into exhaustion on my shoulder. I know it is a terrible thing to say, but there is something so endearing about her when she is this feeble. Probably because that is when all she really wants is to be carried around and cuddled.

Which gives my a reason to be comforting. An excuse to be strong.

This is the hour, at which the World changed. I saw it happen. We all did.

I had a lot on my mind when I picked up my daughter yesterday afternoon. Since she is currently experimenting with switching from two naps during the day to just one, she tends to be much more serene when I pick her up than when I drive her in the mornings. So she is content with just gazing at the trees and houses, as they hurry along past our car.

My thoughts were bobbing around in my head, rascally. Brushing aside my every plea for them to fall in line and allow me to think them through one at a time, in an orderly fashion. Suddenly, I was roused by a voice. It was my daughter. Talking. She told me not to worry so much. The rain had stopped, she said, and the sun was wrestling with the clouds. She pointed to a hill that we drive by every day. Take me there, dad, she said. Take me to the top of the hill.

So we drove up the hill. Funny how you can drive by a place for years without really noticing it. Until one day, when someone opens your eyes and there it is. While we were driving up the winding road, my little girl told me of the adventures that had taken place on that hill. The bravery, the heartaches, and the happy everafters. Once we had parked the car, she took me by the hand and led me to the peak of the little hill. See, dad, she said. From here you can see to the end of the world. Over there, you have the strange mountains, where the trolls and goblins live. And over there, she pointed, is where the elves and fairies dance around in the fields all night long. And oh! Look at that. A straw! She proceeded to taste this irresistible delicacy, sucking the nectar from its thin body. I sat down. And looked around. You really could see the whole world from up here. If you just opened your eyes.

After a while, my little girl looked back up at me. "Dah!", she said enthusiastically and smiled. I smiled back and patted her on the head. "Dah?", she said again, more slowly. Her smile faded. My brief moment of understanding her language had passed. She sighed. The labors of educating parents. Two steps forward. One step back.

It has been raining non-stop since yesterday afternoon. I even heard the wind blowing when I woke up in the middle of the night. And the wind hardly ever visits this place. Rain and wind and darkness. It reminded me of home.

I sat down by the window and stared out into the darkness. The light from the street lamps reflected in small puddles of water, scattered around on the road. Even though I knew it was mild outside, the sound of the wind made it feel so cold. Mostly because this time of year, I am usually heading back home to take part in the yearly driving of the sheep, down from their summer grazing on the mountains.

This is the time of big, waxed parkas. Of thick wool-sweaters. Creaky saddles. Old riding boots. Bad-tasting cigarettes. Mending bridles. Getting re-acquainting with the horses.

You drive up there from the city. An hour and a half. It used to be two to three hours. Half a day. Now it's all asphalt, and new, shorter roads. Kind of takes a bit of the charm out of the trip. But then, it has all lost its shine in so many ways. There are no thousand sheep to be found there. No thirty good horses to choose from. The houses are not fresh and all-white anymore. Bustling with people. So many have grown up or grown old and died, and not that many have replaced them.

I spent my summers up there. Eight until fourteen. Actually, the first year I only stayed a week, I think. But what a week. You see, I grew up surrounded by women. Older sisters. Aunts. My mother and grandmother. So I was leading a pretty sheltered life. And then I got sent to this place. I didn't want to go, naturally. Everything was big. And scary. Rough characters and pretty tough work, for a kid. When the farmer's nephew drove me up there, the summer I turned ten, he stopped by the side of the road as soon as he was out of the jurisdiction of the city police, and mixed a flask of moonshine and coca-cola to sip on. Made him drive the rest of the way a hell of a lot faster. He also used to wake up the working hands – that would be me and a handful of other boys – by standing in the stairs below our bedroom and yelling "Rise, hookers, ship!" You get the picture.

But I quickly became fond of the place. Sure you got banged up a bit. Some tumbles, cuts and bruises. Most of them to your ego. But it built character. It really did. Because you could feel that, despite their roughness, the people there still did give a damn. And they were larger than life. The farmer was a seven-foot tall giant of a man, especially in the eyes of a scragly boy. He always wore these strange, thick denim pants, made by his sister. Designing clothes was not her strongpoint. The pants only augmented the farmer's uneven image. But then this was contrasted by how well read he was. The farm had a fairly-sized library. As was common on a farm of this size. Roughly 5-7000 titles. Many of them were cheap thrillers. And sappy love stories. But a large portion of it were real books. And the range was impressive. Mill, Faulkner, Kierkegaard, Joyce, Steinbeck, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Lagerlöf, Twain, Eliot, Blixen, Dostoyevsky, and Laxness. Lots of Laxness. And the farmer seemed to have read them all. You could be standing on a rocky hill, trying to hold a fence post straight in the everblowing wind, while he pounded it into the ground with an over-sized, two handed hammer. If it didn't go fast enough, he would maybe mumble a few obscene curses, and then break into a poem by Byron. Impressive. Then he was libel to follow it up with some foul and often badly-constructed limericks of his own. Not as impressive. He was a chronic asthma patient, but still persisted in running a large farm, spending most of his summers gasping for breath while haying. So he was a true contradiction in terms. An enigma.

After leaving for school in the fall, we would always return for a day in late September for the sheep roundup. A group of men would have set off, a few days earlier, into the mountains on horses for a two-day journey, to gather the sheep that had been grazing there over the summer. They would drive them down to the valley, to a large common area. There, each farmer would have his group of kids to draw his sheep from the sea of animals. It was always quite a sight, seeing the mostly white droves pouring down the sides of the mountains. And it could be hard work, drawing these stubborn sheep, more than half your size, by their horns or heads.

After my last summer there, when I turned fourteen, I was finally invited to join the men, as they set off for the mountains. It was as undramatic as anything connected with the place. I was just told, as I left for the summer, that I would need to show up three days earlier for the roundup since I would be joining the men that fall. That was it.

There were four of us heading up from the farm I had worked on. Each one had a pair of well-rested horses, and a saddlebag with a few sandwiches, a thick slice of blood sausage, and a bottle of milk. We started our ascend at first light, about six o'clock. This early, even the wind is not awake yet. We floated lazily up the neck of the mountain, along the canyon, where the river tirelessly pushed itself down one waterfall after the other. As we reached the shoulder, the wind had picked up, and it began to rain. After reaching the middle of the moor, around mid-day, we ate quietly, and then split up. As we parted, one of the other men reached over and stuffed a package of cigarettes and a box of matches into my coat pocket. "You'll need it", he said, and rode away.

And then there were just the four of us. Me, the two horses, and this pack of cigarettes. In a hall of mountains, with nothing but the plateau between you and the blue ridges on the horizon, you quickly realize your solitude. Your independence. Your responsibility. And then it gets really, really cold. That's where the cigarettes come in. I had practically never smoked before. Except for the requisite odd one behind school during recess, just to see what it tasted like. So I spent the first part of this journey green in the face. But there was something so fitting in inhaling these toxic fumes, right there where everything is pure and unspoilt. I was like this little locomotion, chugging through the swamps and over the hills, spewing smoke and yelling at the sheep that crossed my path. And it became a part of it. Each year since, I began my trip by searching out a Russian troller, docked in the city harbor. By then, I was working there during the summers anyway, so, like everybody else there, I became adept at avoiding the customs officers. The sailors were always stocked with cheap vodka and bad tobacco. They would exchange a few packets of these horrid, strange cigarettes for a single-use, plastic lighter. Not only was the tobacco foul-tasting, but most of the cigarette was comprised of a narrow, cardboard-like cylinder. Therefore, each cigarette didn't even contain that much tobacco. This suited me fine, because I could feel that I would easily start smoking for real, if I started to like the taste, and I didn't want to do that. I just wanted a way to have my smoke while on these sheep rounding journeys. Sadly, after Russia started to crawl to its feet economically, fewer and fewer of their trollers would show up. And when they did, their vodka wasn't cheap anymore and they brought no more Russian cigarettes to sell. So I turned to filterless Camels. It wasn't the same, but it was rough enough, and tasted almost as bad.

The rounding is in ten days. Which means that they will probably head up a week from now. I know that I will not hear from them. Just as certainly as I know that if I were to show up there, they would have found two horses for me to ride.