I bought these blueberries this morning on my way to work. I couldn't believe how stupendous they were, so I had to get them. And they tasted delish as well, what a treat!

Sixteen years old and life, 'til then, revolved around my ability to drive my parents as crazy as possible. Misunderstood and petulent, the life of a foreign exchange student seemed like the answer to my prayers for adventure and adulthood. With the complete conviction that comes only upon entering teenagehood, I signed up, was chosen, and was promptly sent off to Norway to live for a year, about 75 miles north of the Arctic Circle. I lived in a tiny town called Straumen but went to school in Fauske called Fauske Videregående Skole, otherwise known as the Husmor Skole, or house wife school. The nickname came from the lines of studies available at the school, most of which were "practical." It was a technical school. I found out later it was the kind of school you went to when you didn't really have any prospects from a bookish perspective. I'm glad I didn't know that at the time, because I was enough of a snothead to have thought it "beneath me." I was, after all, an A student in all honors classes and Class Spirit Coordinator to boot. I mean, I was somebody.


So I wore a white uniform complete with bonnet and white clogs. I kept my hair back and made sure I went to cooking class 3 days a week where I made jam and baked cakes and cooked whale and roe and sawed a pig in half (dead, of course) and stirred pots that contained snouty looking food that I couldn't name. I, in turn, showed intoduced my school to peanut butter cookies and lemon merangue pie and Thanksgiving dinner. I realize now how royally that school treated me, the lengths to which they went, my teacher Leikny Simonsen and all my mates, to welcome me and learn about me and teach me and know me.

We picked blueberries one day in the school garden and made jam and the taste of the berries I ate today have brought this memories flooding back to me nearly 20 years later.