Simple Pleasures

With just under a week remaining for our stay in Sogndal, we have entered a reality in which time must be thoughtfully budgeted, especially in conjunction with weather predictions. As we attempt to reserve any remaining days of sunshine–a historically limited resource in Sogndal–for road trips and sightseeing, the leftover time quickly fills with appointments for audiences with local family members. We’ve done well so far covering most, but not all, of the intricate Foss family web scattered throughout the tri-city area of Kaupanger, Sogndal and Leikanger, and today offered the opportunity to check two more visitations off the list.

I met a good handful of the Foss clan on my first trip here in 2019, but our first home visit today, at the home of Oddvar Foss and wife Ragnhild, filled a gap I hadn’t previously covered. Oddvar is another of the six elder Foss brothers about whom much has been written throughout this blog, and the last remaining on my proverbial bingo card. (I even met the youngest of the six, Bjarne–who passed away in 2015–many years ago when he visited my family in the early 1990s in Madison, Wisconsin.) We were rejoined by Torvald Fosse and Magnar Foss, both returning faces from yesterday’s affairs. Oddvar and Ragnhild treated us to a delicious lunch of open-faced hamburgers (karbonader seems to be the closest match I can find, but I’m not sure if that’s quite accurate), vaffler, and bløtkake. The traditional round of show-and-tell with old photographs and memories followed.

Our next and final stop for the day was a reunion I’ve anxiously awaited since arriving in Sogndal. Erik’s second daughter, Trude, lives in Leikanger with her husband, Bjørn, and her twins, Kasper and Therese, although their presence has become more sporadic of late. The last time we were here, the twins were eagerly anticipating their upcoming tests for their drivers’ licenses. Four years later, they are now young adults juggling budding careers and relationships and all the time management challenges they entail, and their stopovers at home have thusly become less predictable. We were fortunate to catch all four of them on a rare night of shared availability.

We value all of our connections with Foss relatives in Norway, but, naturally, we know some of them better than others, often as a result of generational proximity and/or shared interests (the most obvious example being the special relationship between my father and Erik, both family history buffs in the extreme). Trude, for me, is one such cherished relationship. Although we are separated in age by 15 years, we occupy the same generation in the Foss family tree, and there is an ease of conversation I enjoy with her that is unique. Her distinctive connection to our family was perhaps pre-ordained in 1977, when my father took what remains, to this day, one of his favorite photographs among the tens of thousands he possesses: of a six-year-old Trude shyly peering out from the doorway of a Fosskamben cabin, curiously and cautiously surveying her surroundings. The photo still sits on Erik’s wall today.

In the middle of our visit to their house, Bjørn took us to visit a sustainable trout farming operation in Leikanger, a curveball that admittedly was not on my radar for the evening but was nonetheless fascinating to see. It was remarkable to see the relatively small space footprint required to produce this renewable resource at such a scale—a drop in the ocean when compared to agricultural crops that demand wide swaths of land for cultivation.

Back at the house, we closed the evening with a familiar sight on these Norwegian excursions: coffee and dessert. I enjoyed some time to chat with Trude about our lives, sometimes even out of earshot of our (in)attentive fathers. Despite its simplicity, this was one of my favorite evenings of the trip, spent with good company and easygoing conversation. I do hope we will get to see Trude and Bjørn again before we depart, but, either way, I’m very glad we finally got to see them and, as always, am so grateful for their hospitality.