...the first Swedish microsatellite
…launched in 1994, is named after Astrid Lindgren. The payload is named after the characters Pippi, Emil and Mio. It was piggybacked on a Russian satellite, named Tsikada and a US communications satellite (FAISAT) and launched from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia.
These are new things to me, as possibly they are to you too.
I could tell you that I miss you, but you already know that.
Cosmodrome is a great word. Also aerospace. Makes me think of the Aero candy bar, that bubbly deliciously light chocolate that melted so easily on your tongue. I don’t remember if it on my first or second trip to England that I tasted one.
It’s the last hour of work, and I read through a website about Astrid Lindgren’s life, making notes of quotes and bits I liked. Quotes I would have read to you later when we were both home.
Things like: “A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy”.
and ‘Astrid describes herself how it felt to read as a child: “It was something that engaged your entire being, all your senses, sight, smell and touch, more intense than any other event in your whole existence as a child.” A new book was “something almost unbearably wonderful”.’
as well as ‘The school library was full of books and Astrid practically read them all. “I had such a terrible pent-up love of reading that it’s almost strange that when I finally got hold of books I didn’t read myself into the grave.’”
Our childhood was so wonderfully full of books and trips to the library, new books at Christmas. What would we have been if we hadn’t had that? That’s an alternate life I don’t like to think of.
In their later years Astrid and her sisters spoke nearly every day, starting their calls with ‘Death, death, death’, as a way of calling out the most terrible and unavoidable thing, to reckon with death, at the same time as taking the edge of all its sentimentality.”
I still wish for death to be avoidable. You should have been able to avoid it, skipping past it like Elsie Piddock on her fairy hill. You should be out there in the aerospace with all the stars. Maybe you are.
It’s still too far away.
you know this already. I miss you.