Letter to Ranek About Making Peace with the Land

By Fredrick Zydek

Dear Jason: It isn't so much the land you'll have to fuss with.
I have a hunch you were born with an old world soul. Learning
to live in Tonnsberg, Norway, will take far less effort than it took
to learn to live as a married man who followed Zen and a hot

coloratura soprano who couldn't get enough of you in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota. Becoming a man of the midnight sun will be a far
easier task. You're a man who likes living near water. You've
made a good move. But watch out for the air! The stuff we

breathe here in the armpit of America is strange stuff. For all the
moss-causing skin-rotting clammy air we produce out here in the
summer and the fall, not one ounce of it makes it into winter.
Here the air is dry as bone, brittle as cardboard and clean as a ray

of sun. In Norway you'll find the air so filled with bits of moisture
and fragmentary clumps of fog, you'll feel like you're trying to breathe
a cold mist most of the time. This will be okay in Summer but by
fall that damp soggy air will start to clog up the oxygen machine

you grew on The Great Plains of the United States. And don't be
surprised if you head for a real pneumonia - at least the walking
kind. They'll snap you out of it with free meds and a dehumidifier
you will eventually purchase and keep in the home. In a year, you

will sell it through an ad in the paper because you will have become
a Norselander, who wonders why it took him so long to understand
that he needed to be welcomed to life the way Norway welcomes,
as a bright, respected, sacred, sentient contribution to the land.