A POLYGLOT GROUP OF GUESTS

AUGUST 18, 2019 – Friday we picked up travelers from overseas flights—extended family and friends from France and Portugal. Our dual-national daughter-in-law Mylène had arrived Thursday from New York; our son Byron and his birth mother, Sang Hee, fly in next Tuesday.  After clearing customs and baggage claim with extraordinary ease (our guests remarked how friendly the officials were), we drove straight à Le Cabine Rouge.

The next morning, our guests appeared quite chipper, and we proceeded to show them a good day at the lake.

I rigged the old sailboat and with my international crew, sailed “the waters blue” for much of the afternoon. My sailors assisted patiently with my variously improvised “jerry-riggings,” and without hesitation joined me in putting them all to the test in gracious winds. (The Portuguese called me Vasco de Gama.)

We ate le dejeuner on the dock, then inflated new, crazily over-sized, colorful, cartoonish water bobbers—a unicorn, a flamingo, and a rubber ducky.  While some guests sailed, others lounged upon the bobbers towed by guests pedaling the paddle boat. Land lubbers watched the proceedings from aboard the dock.

Late in the afternoon, our whole group hiked over to the our old family cabin at Björnholmfor an ice-cream/American-pie social hosted with unparalleled warmth and refinement by my sister Elsa and her husband Chuck. In full adornment of the old oak table were a multitude of pies from Norske Nook, ice cream, mixed nuts and a broad assortment of wine, beer, and sparkling water. Another sister, Jenny, and daughter Maia provided ample, graceful cheer as well. All the Portuguese speak Spanish (which doesn’t work conversely—Spaniards speaking Portuguese), so Chuck, being fluent in Spanish (I had not known this!) carried on extensive conversations with everyone from the land of Discoverers.

For two hours, you could hear at once, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese—and even a little Swedish, if you’d been on hand when I read the saying painted on our grandmother’s bread-cutting board (“Bread and butter make the cheeks red.”)

While all of this was going on, I said to Jenny, “I wonder how many of our guests could have imagined five years ago that they would one day land here.”

To which she replied, “I wonder how many of us could have dreamed five years ago that last June we’d  have landed in a place called Cortiços, Trás-os-Montes, Portugal!”

But here’s what I don’t have to wonder: what the family founders and keepers of this place would’v thought about our guests attending yesterday’s pleasant gathering at the old cabin; what they would have thought of their Korean-born grandson/great-grandson marrying a French/Portuguese citizen now living in New York.

As folks who welcomed into their homes people from all over the world, our parents and grandparents would’ve been thrilled; thrilled that a place they’d loved and cared for so much would still be in such loving and caring hands in 2019, a gathering place for a polyglot group of guests.

Blogger’s note: for the next 10 days, continuing hosting duties might interrupt the regularity of my postings. Nonetheless, stay tuned.

© 2019 Eric Nilsson