Siri in Isolation

Some years are harder than others, and for us, the first part of 1986 was a difficult year. I remember thinking of us as survivors of a bad patch, when in August we sat in our garden sharing a bottle of champagne in celebration of our 7 th wedding anniversary. With some insistence a large blue butterfly started circling around my head and as I jerked away, Oswaldo said, “Calm down, she just wants some champagne.” Sure enough, when I put down my old-fashioned, wide-mouthed   coupe , the butterfly sat on its rim and helped herself to some   Veuve Clicquot . We felt in the presence of something wild and unexpected, a kind omen perhaps, and a few weeks later I discovered I was pregnant with Victor. He was born on the birthday of my grandmother, who had passed away that July.   After a stoic 2020, the first part of 2021 has not been easy for us due to several health-related reasons. Today, when I limped out in my garden, still with a brace on my leg, I suddenly realized nature...

I arrived in my native Denmark on July first. After spending almost fifteen months sequestered in our house in Rio de Janeiro, I had been anxious for a change of scene. I tested negative for Covid-19 upon arrival and again after 4 days in quarantine. I was finally free to move around and sent Oswaldo a happy mask-less selfie taken in front of the first supermarket I had entered in so many months.   All this changed when minutes later I stumbled on the pavement and crashed to the ground. I found I was unable to get up, could only stretch my upper body to retrieve my glasses, shopping, and phone, all of which had fanned out on the pavement around me. I pulled myself into a sitting position and just knew I had broken the other kneecap. Concerned bystanders called an ambulance, and I called my sister and her husband who live nearby.  The rescue team of three fit, well-trained young men dealt with me calmly and professionally, did not question my refusal to move the leg, and lifted...

The week before last I was certain I would leave in June for two weeks in Denmark. I would travel with Victor, and, with the support of our trusted   caseiro,  Oswaldo would stay behind to take care of things, including the two frisky dogs. We would spend time with our family, meet our brand-new little niece, and see old friends. We would quarantine in a house generously offered by my sister, and there was a possibility Victor might be able to get the one-shot Johnson vaccine. My blah mood lifted, and I began to imagine being in an atmosphere radically different from Brazil right now, breathing a fresher air, and experiencing a returning feeling of freedom to move around. Excited about the trip, we made little of having to wear a mask for 18+ hours, the exposure to airport crowds, and the Covid strict arrival in Denmark. In my mind I was packing my bags. Then Covid interrupted in an unexpected manner Our  caseiro , who has been with us more than 30 years and who had Covid...

  “How are you?” asks my Danish friend, Tove, calling from Santiago, Chile, where she lives. We are speaking in Danish, and I pause a bit before I select a word to describe how I feel. “ Modløs ,” I finally say. (Discouraged, disheartened, dispirited are some translations, all of them applicable).     She counters with “ vemodig”  (sad, melancholic), and we both laugh at our plight. ‘Depressed’ is next, she adds, and we chuckle again, the way Danes often react to a shared bad situation. Like me she has been largely confined to her house for more than 13 months under the much stricter Chilean quarantine rules, and like me she has received her second shot of the Chinese CoronaVac (Sinovac) vaccine, which, we have just learnt, will not be authorized for inclusion in a European vaccination passport, and thus not grant us access to Denmark. Both of us are lucky to live in nice houses with a view and a garden, but the enforced confinement is getting to us and draining our ...

For my first CoronaVac (Sinovac) shot, a month ago, I was flustered and apprehensive. I had not left the house to spend time in a public place for more than a year and dressed in the Danish red and white colors for good luck. We had arrived 40 minutes early fearful they’d run out of vaccines and the whole undertaking was stressful, from the waiting in a socially distant line   -– to the slow shuffling in line through a darkened Planetarium, the local vaccination venue. The shot itself was over in a minute, but it took a while to settle down from the experience, spraying everything with alcohol and washing hands, whilst waiting for after-effects that never manifested. By contrast, my second shot was a breeze, we arrived later, stood only briefly in line and made the time to take a decent photo of this rather momentous event.   The organization by SUS, the Brazilian public health care system was exemplary – friendly, objective and efficient – organizing on one side the elderly r...

  The word ‘ revoada’  [ rre·vo· a ·duh ]   forms in my mouth at the sight of 20 or more black-billed toucans gathering in a tree at the foot of our garden. It’s what happens when your brain has several – I have 3: English, Portuguese, and Danish – languages at its disposal. It picks the best word for you. In this case, the Portuguese word is just more evocative than the simpler ‘flock’ in English and similar ‘ flok ’ in Danish.  .    It is the morning of Easter Sunday and Victor and I have leapt out of our seats on the veranda when we become aware of so many toucans landing. Their egg-yolk-yellow chest feathers glitter amongst the branches as the birds preen and jump from branch to branch. We marvel as they lift up one by one to fly in a straight line across our roof towards the tall Imperial palm in our front garden. About this time of year, the huge clusters of white flowers sprouted beneath its massive leaves have turned into tangled clumps of hard litt...

Many years ago, in Rio de Janeiro, the Motion Picture Association used to host fabulous screenings for new movies, many with the presence of famous actors. We were amongst those invited and it is how I came to shake James Stewart’s hand. The actor was by then quite old, white-haired and with big horn-rimmed glasses, but he stood tall and calm next to Gloria, his lovely wife of many years, waiting patiently to shake the hands of the long line of starstruck   carioca   fans. When it became my turn, I muttered something heartfelt, forgotten now, but I still remember how honored I felt to have shaken the hand of this legendary actor. Not long after this Oswaldo and I stood in line for a flight from Paris to NY, when it became clear that it was overbooked. The airline was offering $300 and a seat on the next flight back to the US for whomever gave up their ticket. We were discussing whether to do this when the man in front of us, who turned out to be a very handsome Ben Gazarra – w...

I solve the NYT mini puzzle every morning. It’s a pleasant little test which lasts only a couple of minutes. The other day one clue was “Airport Boarding Area” and the correct answer, which I knew immediately, was “Gate.” Suddenly, I was filled with a longing for being at a gate, going somewhere. I thought of walking down the long airport corridors trailing my carry-on and felt a pang of loss. I REALLY miss traveling. We have been cloistered inside our walls more than a year now, since March 14. Our home is a delightful, if not downright luxurious place in which to be confined – and we’re so lucky to be here, together - but the feeling of being ‘locked in’ is always present. This morning, as I crossed our patio, leading the dogs to do their morning ‘ xixi ,’ I looked up and was struck by the clear outline of the  Dois Irmãos  profiled against an intensely blue sky. The moment was so pleasurable, so harmonious that I stopped to raise my arms wide to breathe in deeply (accompani...

It hasn’t rained for a while and everything is very dry. The temperature is easily 35Cº (95Fº) and we’ve slowed down, living life in the shade, away from the glare. In the mornings the rays from the white-hot sun slant sideways across the hill in front of our house and illuminate five tall palm-trees, planted in a row. The fronds catch the breeze from the sea in the far distance and shiver and tremble, making the treetops seem hung with lights, as if for Christmas. I watch this from my seat at the big table on the veranda where I sit under the slowly turning fan, dogs rummaging around me. They run, pant, growl, drink water noisily until Loki sticks his big paws into the bowl and splashes with gusto until only a brackish puddle remain. Then they pass out and sleep for while on the cool stone floor. Victor sits across from me and we’re both writing in our journals, a habit which we’ve kept up since the beginning of this year.  Our house faces SSE and until noon our pool has no shade ...

Victor loved dressing up when he was little, and I, who have always loved sewing, threw myself into making all kinds of costumes for him. Having lived through many Carnival seasons in Brazil I have learnt there is a freedom in putting elements together to form a visual whole. The quality of the stitches is not so important, what matters is the sparkling creativity.  For his fourth birthday, which had a Peter Pan theme, his costume consisted simply of torn pieces of green cloth held together with an old belt of mine and a little hat made from the same fabric decorated with a feather I found somewhere. Green sweatpants completed the outfit. He was thrilled to be in character and instructed me to sprinkle him with ‘pixie dust’. He was very put out when he couldn’t fly. All little kids like capes, and Victor had many – amongst them a heroic blue prince cape and a vampire’s black cape dramatically lined with red ‘silk’ and in a later period of monsters and beasts I repurposed an old len...

We were taking a post-lunch siesta when I  happened to notice  a voicemail  coming in  on my  silenced  phone. It was Ann, my 84 - year - old walking partner,  telling  us   – with urgency in her fine British voice -  to go to the  local  posto de sa ú de   (community health clinic). “They’re  vaccinati ng!” she said.  I called her back, and  by then  she'd just gotten her shot, as had another 81-year-old friend . According to an official schedule they were vaccinating people in the upper 90s that day, but Ann insisted  they'd vaccinate anybody over 80   – Oswaldo’s age. We  lurched out of bed,  put on our shoes, and ran flustered back and forth getting our documents and vaccination certificates. By then Victor was waiting with the car   -  leaving Ana to deal with the arriving dog-trainer  -  and  he  drop ped  us at the  ‘ posto’  g...

It took an outbreak of termites in my storage closets for me to realize I was the owner of 250 assorted plates. This was not always the case. When we moved into this house in 1980, we didn’t have much of anything. To get us started then, I had bought a stack of white plates, neutral enough to be used for every day and for the parties that we planned to throw.   My parents had loved to throw parties, and were not concerned about being too correct, nor were they about to spend a lot of money, when less would do. For this reason, perhaps, their parties were always very lively, and people relaxed. I remember them dancing wildly in our cleared dining room to Bill Haley’s newly released “Rock around the Clock,” a doctor friend with a trickle of blood running down his forehead from having bumped into the low hanging chandelier. We lived in a beautiful big house, and no one minded that the wine was pretty basic, and the simple food cooked by my mother. And they had plenty of plates, for my...