… after our late night freezing sled excursion with a big bunch of noisy French tourists in the snow-blanketed Lapland beech forest, where we had tried to catch, in vain, the Aurora Borealis, we got back to the pleasantly warm hotel room on the bank of the solidly frozen river. We didn’t turn on the main light in the room, so that we could enjoy looking out of our window onto the snow on the river and its banks, which lit up the night with reflected moonshine under the dark firmament. The stars were hidden behind the curtain of pregnant clouds in the -15°C cold outside – only the Moon managed to glow through them with smudged edges. … as my mind faded into a calm worry-free haze, I felt a pure silk-smooth happiness as I listened to the gentle sleep-breaths of the loved one next to me in the darkness, which was the sweet lullaby helping me into a happy dream …


… the bluegrass concert was over at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, TN. The audience quickly found their cars in the large parking area. We passed the poster which warned “no firearms allowed in the auditorium”. We seemed to be the last two people quickly descending the staircase. We were in a hurry, as our friendly black cabbie, who ferried us each day from and to our hotel, was waiting outside under the starry sky. My sweetheart turned her head round: “come on, Las”. That was the only voice and words that I ever needed. “I’m coming, Thelms ...”


… it was the 20th of August, National Constitution Day in Hungary. The beloved river of my youth, the gently flowing Tisza in the centre of my old university city, Szeged, reflected the lights from the other bank from the sandy lido. The curly English angel standing next to me on the embankment picked out and commented on the most impressive squibs of the huge celebratory fireworks shooting into the starry balmy Hungarian summer night. The light show bursting from the dark riverside woods highlighted the lovely features of this wonderful English-Scottish creature next to me. On the way home (to my Dad’s apartment they lent us), we passed the busy patisseries and bars lit up by coloured neon lights, then through faintly lit side streets, sat down a bit outside the world’s fourth largest synagogue to watch the moon highlight the contrasts on the huge exotic building, with its doves and jackdaws in its high nooks and arches already asleep. … we trudged up to the third floor of the apartment block – next morning, we had our breakfast in the kitchen where I used to have my childhood breakfasts with my Mum and Dad as I was growing up. The gentle green-eyed curly English girl who made it worthwhile to have been born bravely joined my Hungarian style morning meal, which wasn’t at all “Continental” ...


… after 19 years of hard fight and emotional torture, I at last found the person that I had been waiting for all my adult life – my life pal, the one who was the only really true wife for me, as defined by poets and heaven as imagined in religious hopes. This wonderful creature sent me the song that had come out in the year of our meeting online: “Come Away With Me” by Norah Jones. The words and feeling of this song captured my heart forever, and it is still calling me – I still want to follow this magic call to be with the only truly important person of my adult life, wherever she might be, even in this godless cold material Universe.

Like Mark Twain concluded one of his short stories: "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden."