Time is not linear

-And musings about place and time from my childhood and today!

This December it’s been 18 years since we made Redlands, California our home. I have a hard time understanding that the time spent in the US is now at a ‘legal adult’ age, this is the place where my English went from okay to decent. The training wheels came off and I am now more confident writing in English than my mother tongue, Danish.

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about time. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

Similarly, for 18 years I called Skive, Denmark, my home from I was 5 years old till 23 when I moved back to the capital city, Copenhagen (pronounced [koh-puhn-hey-guhn] -don’t forget the ‘hey’!) where I was born.

Eighteen years I spent of my most formative years in one place, Skive (pronounced [skee-vuh]. That is where I learned to bike, roamed the local woods with my cousin, walked barefooted all summer, played hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids until the lights came on at night, where I fell in love for the first time, moved into my brother’s basement at 19, and thought I would never go to college (until I did at 24!).

At 31 my husband and I arrived to the US on an H1B visa (his). This is where both of our kids were born, where I learned to run, roamed the park and streets with my kids in a double stroller, where I began following my childhood dream of becoming a writer, and thought it impossible that I would ever get published (until I did! First as an opinion writer in Redlands Daily Facts, then as a reporter for Redlands Community News).

To the left the castle in Skive which is now a folk high school. To the right, Kimberly Crest in Redlands, the French Chateau inspired mansion that was built in 1897 and in 1905 purchased by John Alfred Kimberly, one of the founders of what later became Kleenex.

But wasn’t the childhood years longer in a way? Life seemed endless and full of possibilities like the days were a literal kid in a candy store. Consequences? What consequences? You could jump from the highest wall in your backyard and bounce right back on your feet. You could be out all night and at work at 9am the next morning. I could eat dessert every day and never gain an ounce.

Now, I re-adjust my pillow in the morning and get a stiff neck. I step down from the last step on the staircase and get chronic unexplained foot pain. My body is telling me that I will get nothing done the next day, if I as much as think about going to bed past midnight. And even though the years are shorter, the body keeps the score, like an old printing calculator with a fresh paper roll. Screech-screech-ping. Add this new unfamiliar pain to the tab, here is another bad habit I could work on. Ping!

In a way, you end up with boundless memories from your childhood and youth, when every experience was the very first. Every experience could break you open into what a phenomenal place Earth is, and equally break you apart with the first friendship rejection, your first unrequited love. That was when time stood still. I will follow this dandelion seed until it settles in a new world, or no one will ever like me again.

Time is taught in a linear fashion, even though the four seasons return each year. We learn in school how history has propelled humanity towards progress in a jagged line. Even though set-backs are more often than leaps.

I look at the two 18 year periods of my life. Both were set in a city where I found life-long friends, lived in a two-story house, had my childhood/my kids childhood, and dreamed big dreams.

I see the first 18 years placed in the outer rim of a coil where time is stretched and believed to be endless, the later period is in the center. A center where each turn around the circle becomes smaller and you begin to understand, one day the spiral will end. Midlife am I right?!

Both Skive and Redlands have thus become the places where I have spent most of my life. Both cities have strong communities and pride, they are places where young people move away for later to return and raise their own families. Changes are disliked until the new development becomes old and trusted.

To the left a building in downtown Skive that used to be a butcher, a bank and is now an interior design store. To the right, downtown Redlands, so green!

While visiting Skive this summer, I noticed that downtown pedestrian streets had more vintage/thrift stores than regular stores. And then this fall three new vintage stores have popped up in Redlands. Are we on the same wavelength or what!

Is Redlands my new Skive? Well, not exactly. I always felt like I didn’t belong in the town I grew up in (like so many of us, the world is big and I wanted so much of it). Redlands on the other hand I adore, it’s where my heart landed and made a nest. I want that for so many other immigrant hearts here, truly. A place to land and a place to belong. Both when the years stretch and when they sprint at a breathless pace.

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