Past in Present
Mar. 6th, 2013 03:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intheheartTitle: Past in Present
Rating: G
Summary: Lars comes face to face with history.
When Lars was ten years old, it was his turn to go with Gramma Ingrid to Denmark for the summer, to stay with her friends and see the country.
Gramma Ingrid had been born in Odense, and it wasn't 'til she married Granda Eric that she moved to America. When Granda was alive she'd gone back for a week every summer, and now that Granda was dead she spent the whole summer there, and took one grandchild with her every summer. Last summer Anna came back raving about Hans Christian Andersen and how cool he was and how she'd seen his house and his cathedral and all that. Lars didn't care at all about Hans Christian Andersen-- he thought his stories were soppy and also made-up and he had no use for made-up stories. But he thought Odense might be nice, away from his brothers and sisters and all their noise and junk.
Secretly he was also glad to be away from his mom and dad. It wasn't that they weren't nice, it was just that Mom was sick all the time and Dad was unhappy and scared and Lars didn't like that. It made him nervous. He'd be glad to be away from that.
So he was excited about going while he packed, and he was excited about going when he got on the plane, and he was excited about going when he and Gramma Ingrid got to Odense and fell asleep in the guest bedroom in Gramma Ingrid's best friend Else's house. But then he woke up.
It turned out all Gramma Ingrid's friends were old, and they didn't want to do anything more than sit around the house and play card games and talk to Gramma Ingrid in Danish. There were some other boys on the street but they were all older than Lars and didn't want to play with him. That was one thing about lots of brothers and sisters; there was always someone to hang around with. In Odense there was no one, and he spent long afternoons sitting by the river and staring out over the water.
One afternoon he wandered out into the fields around the city, hands in his pockets, just looking for something to see. So far he'd found nothing, just waves and waves and waves of wheat and occasionally a farmer, or some cows. It was boring, that was the problem, tons of nature and no one to explore it with and all of it just boring.
Then he stumbled across the ship.
It wasn't much. Just a big boat-shaped oval of stones, pointed at either end, prow and stern, atop a low hill in the center of a wheat field. He didn't even recognize it at first, not until he walked into it and stood in the center, where the mast would be, and suddenly it all fell into place.
The wind blew and the wheat fields were the sea, golden under a setting sun. The oval of stones was a longboat, slim and fast, almost leaping from wave to wave on the wide sea.
He blinked and it was gone, the ship a ragged oval of rocks, the sea a wheat field once again.
He did research afterwards. The ship was a grave, a marker for some long-dead Viking chief, a fragment of nameless history. It fascinated him, that someone could be buried so long ago, be forgotten so thoroughly, and yet leave this small marker in the dust of the world for a bored ten-year-old boy to find.
He went to the grave every day for the rest of the summer.
By the time he got back to New York, he had fallen in love with the past.
Rating: G
Summary: Lars comes face to face with history.
When Lars was ten years old, it was his turn to go with Gramma Ingrid to Denmark for the summer, to stay with her friends and see the country.
Gramma Ingrid had been born in Odense, and it wasn't 'til she married Granda Eric that she moved to America. When Granda was alive she'd gone back for a week every summer, and now that Granda was dead she spent the whole summer there, and took one grandchild with her every summer. Last summer Anna came back raving about Hans Christian Andersen and how cool he was and how she'd seen his house and his cathedral and all that. Lars didn't care at all about Hans Christian Andersen-- he thought his stories were soppy and also made-up and he had no use for made-up stories. But he thought Odense might be nice, away from his brothers and sisters and all their noise and junk.
Secretly he was also glad to be away from his mom and dad. It wasn't that they weren't nice, it was just that Mom was sick all the time and Dad was unhappy and scared and Lars didn't like that. It made him nervous. He'd be glad to be away from that.
So he was excited about going while he packed, and he was excited about going when he got on the plane, and he was excited about going when he and Gramma Ingrid got to Odense and fell asleep in the guest bedroom in Gramma Ingrid's best friend Else's house. But then he woke up.
It turned out all Gramma Ingrid's friends were old, and they didn't want to do anything more than sit around the house and play card games and talk to Gramma Ingrid in Danish. There were some other boys on the street but they were all older than Lars and didn't want to play with him. That was one thing about lots of brothers and sisters; there was always someone to hang around with. In Odense there was no one, and he spent long afternoons sitting by the river and staring out over the water.
One afternoon he wandered out into the fields around the city, hands in his pockets, just looking for something to see. So far he'd found nothing, just waves and waves and waves of wheat and occasionally a farmer, or some cows. It was boring, that was the problem, tons of nature and no one to explore it with and all of it just boring.
Then he stumbled across the ship.
It wasn't much. Just a big boat-shaped oval of stones, pointed at either end, prow and stern, atop a low hill in the center of a wheat field. He didn't even recognize it at first, not until he walked into it and stood in the center, where the mast would be, and suddenly it all fell into place.
The wind blew and the wheat fields were the sea, golden under a setting sun. The oval of stones was a longboat, slim and fast, almost leaping from wave to wave on the wide sea.
He blinked and it was gone, the ship a ragged oval of rocks, the sea a wheat field once again.
He did research afterwards. The ship was a grave, a marker for some long-dead Viking chief, a fragment of nameless history. It fascinated him, that someone could be buried so long ago, be forgotten so thoroughly, and yet leave this small marker in the dust of the world for a bored ten-year-old boy to find.
He went to the grave every day for the rest of the summer.
By the time he got back to New York, he had fallen in love with the past.
