In the days that ended August and began September, Michael and I were away in the Arctic. I shared about our trip over the course of a couple of weeks on social media after we returned. But many choose not to spend time there (for so many good reasons), and maybe you'd like to hear about it too. And if you don’t have time to read, maybe give some of the photos a glance, because it’s an extraordinary place.

Arnøya

Written September 8th: Michael and I are home from Norway, and before he joined me I spent a week reading, writing, and exploring on a small island in the Arctic in an old homestead on the shore with my very dear, old friend and a new friend to whom that home belongs.

It’s a place of saltwater and stone, reindeer and glacier, wild blueberry and chanterelles, wood stove and sauna. A place of wool blankets and bicycles, afternoon coffee and homemade bread. A sei whale visited us. Jellyfish pulsed purple in the shallows. Lingonberries ripen at the end of the road where a shale beach turns to boulders out at the edge of the world in a place where oblong depressions in the earth covered by crowberry and bunchberry show us Stone Age people once inhabited this land between steep mountainside and rocky beach.

To say it is beautiful, to say the time was treasured, to say I will always remember, is not to say enough.

Sommarøy-Hillesøy

Written September 9th: When Michael joined me in Norway we went first to the islands of Sommarøy and Hillesøy, joined to each other, and to the mainland, by one-way bridges. Here, the colors of the Caribbean wash up on myriad Arctic white sand beaches while early autumn turns the bunchberry red. Sod roof boathouses line the shore where tiny pink shells scatter amid coral from the largest coldwater reef in the world.

It’s an almost overwhelmingly beautiful dreamscape, a combination of colors and temperatures and architecture I wouldn’t have believed existed together in one place. We parked the Fiat and didn’t get back inside it. We hiked up the steep rocky flank of Hillesøytoppen. We ate homemade Norwegian sweet buns in a boathouse turned beach cafe by a retired astronomer. We said hello to horses and walked the graveyard at sundown. We were happy. So happy we returned days later, left the city for another unplanned day and night there—a holiday within a holiday—and I will never be sorry for that.

Senja & Tromsø

Written September 22nd: It’s the first day of fall, and we’ve been home over two weeks from our trip in northern Norway, above the Arctic Circle where fall had already set in. There, the leaves of the low blueberry and the bunchberry dogwood covering the ground were already red, and the birch had begun to turn. The light lasted longer there than here, but the temperatures were crisp and low. These photos show a bit from our time on the island of Senja in and around a town called Torsken, and just a very little bit from our days in Tromsø including the Ishavskatedralen, the Arctic Cathedral.

Senja is Norway’s second largest island. It’s mountains on mountains on fjords. Seemingly endless peaks on peninsula-like fingers of land formed by the deep fjords stand high above the sea. In Tromsø one can eat fresh cardamom buns and cinnamon buns any day of the week at an array of cafes. And that’s worth a lot.