I bought some fingerless gloves from a craftshop on the top of a hill. The shop had formerly been a restaurant. My grandmother's first job was as a waitress in that restaurant that is now a craftshop. There is still a restaurant on top of this hill, hill is a bit of an understatement, but mountain is certainly far too big, and it (the restaurant) is still run by the same people. They have merely expanded. The new building is many times larger and has an ice cream cafe. Anyway, these fingerless gloves had no leather palms, as is traditional for them. So, they were whisked away one night by Ingmar, my grandmother's boyfriend. He works in a shoe shop and is rather adroit and rending leather. I woke up and the gloves had leather palms, to make holding the steering wheel of my vehicle less slippery.

On this beautiful near-spring day, I am reminded of Åland. The weather was almost always sunny with a trace of clouds. Very temperate, too, never too hot. I remember walking around in my grandmother's apple orchard, sunlight passing through trees not quite in bloom. Salt water reeds swaying to the beat of some secret song. Dusty pink granite quietly aging and observing, as rocks tend to do. Since native granite is mixed into the tar the roads are all pink. Like cheap tye-dye after too many washes, it is a beautiful washed out pink. Even the roads without tar are pink, as the granite is crushed for the unpaved roads. It is stunning and adds a mystical quality to the land. The land exudes a magic, one would not be surprised to see knights on horses galloping on distant hills or to see children in unbuttoned overalls running up to the neighbor's house to tell them they had a phone call waiting.
It turns out that many of the smaller islands only had one phone line when it was a new device. Each house may have a phone, but only one line for the whole island. Someone would answer it, ask who the call was for, and then make all the phones ring a certain number of times. Once for the first house, twice for the second, thrice for the third etc. Its a neat system.