5 min readOctober, first snowfall. First winter since separating from my daughter’s dad. On the drive to his parents’ house in the Reykjavík, Iceland, suburbs, where my studded tires are stored, my Volkswagen nearly spins out a half-dozen times. I’m shaking by the time I arrive. It’s pitch black, and the air is cold enough to steal your breath. My ex-husband is colder. We’re both still raw. Wordlessly, without looking at me once, he hefts the winter tires into my trunk. I don’t know what to do now; I’ve never taken care of the car myself.
As I back out of the driveway, my car skids. The street is coated in slick ice. When I try to straighten out, to proceed down the road, the wheels spin uselessly, unable to find traction. I’m stuck. I call out to my ex-husband for help. He stands in the doorway, saying nothing.
“I can’t do this by myself,” I yell, close to tears.
I mean move the car. I mean raise our daughter. I mean make it through another winter on this island.
He slides into the driver’s seat and instructs me to stand at the rear bumper. “Push,” he says. “Hard.” He jerks the gearshift, guns the engine, repeats the process. I push, hard. Harder. I cough on car exhaust. I lose my footing on the ice, and my chin slams into the curved glass of the hatch. I am where I’ve always wanted to be—living, really living, in Iceland—and it hurts.
When I was a child in Connecticut, kids at school used to ask whether my Icelandic relatives lived in igloos. Whether my dad was a Viking. Whether, and I got this one a lot, Iceland was indeed really green and Greenland really ice. My Icelandic heritage was a novelty. I’ve never met anyone from Iceland before! was a common refrain. Meanwhile, to my Icelandic cousins in the 1990s, my brother and I were as good as American movie stars. They asked us about the unfathomable varieties of breakfast cereal, about at-home teeth-whitening strips, about high school prom. They wanted to practice their English. They struggled with v and w.
My family traveled to Iceland, my dad’s homeland, every summer. There, my brother and I spent long, delirious days and nights of constant daylight camping beside glacial creeks, trekking through lava fields and across black-sand shores, playing soccer with our cousins until 2 a.m. We drove through rocky rivers in my uncle Steini’s jeep. We drove loops on the one road in the village where some of my cousins lived, because that’s what teenagers did in a town so small. We filled our pockets with pockmarked black rocks from the beach where my grandmother and her sisters used to build castles from lava sand. We played a card game called Olsen Olsen and snuck capfuls of licorice-flavored schnapps. Someone always had a guitar. There were sheep everywhere. Family everywhere. And it was always summertime.
I moved to Iceland by accident, nine summers ago. I came to the country to visit family and decided not to go home. The following day, I met the man who would become my husband, then my daughter’s dad, and, eventually, my ex-husband. That first summer fizzled out, and in its wake came winter. Initially I welcomed the waning daylight; the midnight sun has always made me feel a little uncomfortably tipsy. But soon the city sank into disorienting darkness. By December, the sun hung lazily at the horizon for a few measly hours before disappearing again.
I’ve endured nine winters since then—five with my ex-husband, four without—but those dark, stormy days can still test me.
Last March, I ran outside in the middle of the night, in only a T-shirt and underwear, trying to prevent the grill on my deck from being blown into a row of parked cars. The grill had been chained to the side of my house, and the wind had ripped its metal anchor out of the concrete. As dirt, debris, and freezing rain swirled around me and pelted my face, wind thrashing my body sideways, I wondered not for the first time how much more I could take of this place.
It’s not just the winter, or the weather. It’s also that a bag of baby carrots can cost almost $7. It’s that my Icelandic is good, but not good enough, not quick enough, to convey all my personality. It’s that the relatives who used to caravan to the countryside in the summer rarely see each other outside of my family’s visits. It’s that I am—it has taken me some years to accept this—an immigrant here, and as such I often feel different, out of place, in a way I can’t always name. It’s that my daughter is growing up in a country and culture still a little foreign to me.
One Icelandic word for homeland is fósturjörð: foster-earth, the soil that raised you. But fóstur also means fetus. A place where the most elemental parts of you were formed.
Iceland is not my fósturjörð, but my ancestors are buried here, near the farms and fishing villages they came from. My daughter was born here during a whiteout blizzard six winters ago. She took her first steps on this soil. She has given me not just a past here, but a future.
She told me recently that one of her favorite feelings in the world is stepping out of JFK Airport, into the thick New York City air.
JFK? Of all places from sea to shining sea, JFK?
She sometimes says of the kids at her school: “They don’t understand everything about my heart, because they don’t speak English like I do.” She tells me she prefers English to Icelandic. She counts down the days until we go to visit my parents in Connecticut. I suspect she may inherit my cross-Atlantic longing, but in the other direction. Maybe someday, she will live in my homeland, as I am still learning to live in hers.
There is an Icelandic saying: Heima á ég verst, en þar þykir mér best, which means “At home I fare worst, yet there I like it best.” I used to set my frustrations with Iceland beside my memory of America and compare. And complain. But now, when I travel back to the East Coast—to strip malls, beaches with beige sand, houses with sprawling lawns, traffic on the freeway—I miss the smallness of my life in Iceland. I miss the glacial water that comes from the tap. I miss the open space, the ocean everywhere, the mountains. I miss the neighborhood gas station where I get my tires changed twice a year. I miss my bed. I miss the way the Christmas lights reflect off the snow.
Summers here are brilliant and short. It’s the rest of the year that makes this place my home: wind warnings in autumn, not-impossible snowfall in June. The ballet studio down the street, the mediocre fish shop around the corner. Winter walks to school with my daughter, her flashlight bobbing through the dark.
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Margrét Ann Thors is an Icelandic-American writer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She received her MFA from Columbia University and teaches at the University of Iceland. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. Freyja is her debut novel.