The view from my hospital bed at 4:25am.
This month’s issue touches, in non-specific detail, on hospitals, surgery and fertility.
I get to know the Swedish city of Uppsala between hospital appointments. It’s a flat, pretty city just outside of Stockholm. It has a branch of The English Bookshop and a riverside cafe with a very rude barista. It’s a three-and-a-half hour drive from home, but we always give ourselves at least four hours to get there. On a January morning, we arrive too early, so we head to the old town where enormous mounds, like hills, mark the graves of important Vikings. On a Tuesday in April, we are left unimpressed by the castle. It is windy, and winter’s departure has unearthed a world of dust that blows through the streets like desert storms.
Akademiska Sjukhuset is renowned for its gynaecological department. The staff are kind and attentive. I can see the castle from the window of the room I’m in, dark against the bright, blue sky. Spring has burst onto the stage this past week. It has brought with it hot weather and the homecoming songs of returning migratory birds. A month ago it felt almost impossible to even imagine the feeling of the sun on my shoulders. At 4:25am I see it cresting on the dark horizon. I pull myself to sitting in my hospital bed to take a photo.
*
Spring is not my favourite season. I know there are many spring aficionados out there, so I’m sorry, but I’m a summer baby. This year, though, I am tuned into the slightest movement of the season. Everywhere, we’ve all been desperate for winter to pass, nowhere more so than a place where there’s been snow on the ground for the past six months. I monitor spring’s return closely: in the ditches on the sides of the roads, the perennial tussilago, or coltsfoot, a small, dandelion-like yellow flower, has started to pop up – an accepted national symbol for the season. The pile of ice and snow that had been thawing on the porch finally melts away. In the sky, Canada geese honk on their way to the lake, and lapwings sing their strange siren call on the field we pass on our first cycle of the year.
Snow melt brings deer out of the forests and into gardens and fields, where they munch on the freshly revealed grass. Around this time last year, on the morning of a different hospital appointment, I caught a mother and doe grazing at the edge of our garden, so I’ve come to view them as a kind of lucky charm, a positive sign to take with me to the many, many consultations and examinations that the last two-and-a-half years have entailed. On the morning of this appointment, we pull into a rest stop to stretch our legs, and there they are: four lithe, grey bodies in the distance, made very small by the pylons that tower above them.
*
The operation goes well. Hospital inspire in me a necessary fearlessness when it comes to speaking Swedish, and I seem to be doing OK, until S tells me I keep replying to everything with, ‘OK, kul,’ which doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means but rather something along the lines of, ‘OK, fun!’. I find this very funny, and keep saying it. I’m discharged the next day.
At home, S makes me a bed of blankets and pillows on the sofa. We watch Denzel Washington movies and I do very little of anything at all. I think about the home of my body; about the unwelcome growths that had taken up residence there, how they’ve now been evicted, vacating the space for, I hope, something else to grow. I think about fertility and health, and how uncomfortable it has felt for my body to be viewed through the lens of who it might carry (a baby) rather than who it already carries (me). How decisions have been made for my care that prioritise the preservation of that hallowed capacity above all else, rather than focusing entirely on what I want or need, even if fertility is, of course, a huge part of it – the reason I’m there, in the operating room, in the first place.
At 9pm, I hear church bells ringing somewhere nearby in the city. Throughout the broken sleep of that night, the cries of newborn babies chime through the floors of the hospital from some other nearby ward.
*
There are so many birds in the garden. Bramblings, fieldfares and song thrushes all pay our front lawn a visit in enthusiastic numbers. I learn that many of them have likely just returned here from the U.K., which makes me think of home-home. Home-home is a place I peer at through my fingers as it weathers a time of upheaval. At least, I think, the migratory patterns of birds can more or less be relied on.
Three days before the end of April and a fire is igniting inside me. My energy is returning and I want to put my hands to the soil in the garden. I buy colourful pansies for the brave pollinators that are buzzing on the breeze during this unseasonably cold spring. I cast manure in a protective circle around my rhubarb and at the bases of the blackcurrant bushes and apple trees that all drip with buds about to burst.
The threshold from April to May is an eventful one in Sweden. Valborg asks for bonfires, but windy weather and laziness put paid to our good intentions. May Day is the first since the right-wing coalition took over. Beltane hurries us towards summer, but the cows have not yet been let out to graze in the fields around the village, and I’m still waiting for spring’s proper arrival. I think I can see it now, returning more of itself to the land and the sky every day; one seed, bud, bird at a time until it blooms, takes flight.
My short story collection, Tools For Surviving A Storm, is out now.
‘In a transporting, original collection, Nadia Henderson examines the lines between nature and the human world through stories set in landscapes both brutal and beautiful.’
I’m Nadia, a London-born writer living and working in rural Sweden. I write short stories, creative non-fiction and, of course, newsletters. If you like, you can find out more about me and my work on my website. Thank you for reading Home Comforts!