Let’s begin with the rainbow, even though, in an ideal world, it would probably come at the end:
It has been a wet summer, worst in twenty-eight years. Mud and gloom. The old family farm, Fjederholt, empty for most of a decade, grows damper and mousier by the minute.
“Remarkable,” say the curious neighbors, “that it hasn’t all fallen down.”
Fjederholt: the name’s meaning can only be surmised by looking 450 years back at archaic spellings in dusty church records. “Cattle grove,” decided my grandfather, the amateur historian. Maybe so, but by the time my ancestors settled in a century and a half ago, it would have been a name more aspirational than true… Read more of my essay at Velamag.com