Trenchwork

DH and I took a break this week and went for a drive on a day when the weather actually happened to be nice (after nearly 2 weeks of rain). Along the way, I took this photo:

It’s a fairly typical wooden building, but not quite what they call a Trønderlån. It may have actually started out that way, but I don’t remember it being associated with a farm at the moment. It’s someone’s home. Trønderlån is the local dialect word for one of the long houses on a farm. They’re usually two-story as is this one, nearly in a shotgun-style construction, often white, and tend to be built onto over the years as the family grows. As a result, some of them are very long.

This building, however, is interesting not so much because of its shape, but because of one of its additions, and that’s why I took the photo. See anything unusual in that picture above?

Try this one:

Catchng on a bit? Need a little more help? Try this:

That knobby thing sticking out of the wall? It’s usually painted bright red to keep anyone from missing it. It’s a grenade shell.

This is, I think, one of the things that catch my attention about living in another country: the differences in history, and the presence of history. Don’t get me wrong; as Americans, we most certainly have our own history. We find remnants of it all over the place, such as the arrowheads in the nearby streambed, and Civil War debris at any battlefield. Nor am I saying that one history is more significant than another. But, somehow, we tend to compartmentalize those bits of our past. Unless we live at the site, we go to them; they are not daily reminders in our everyday lives. Only a small percentage of us actually live with this type of historical postscript.

The same cannot be said elsewhere in the world, and I wonder if it’s easy for us to forget that sometimes. Generally speaking, we’re not sitting in a house with someone else’s grenade in the wall of our home.