Our last night in Copenhagen, my daughter ordered orange wine, of which she is a huge fan. Orange wine is made from white wine grapes but instead of quickly getting rid of the skins, stems, and seeds after pressing, everything is left to macerate together. What follows from this "skin contact" is color, complexity, and sometimes a bit of funk in the best possible way. Nothing gets added. It gets elaborated, by contact and over time.
After dinner we went to unlock our rental bikes. We'd picked Donkey Republic over Lime because they're regular bikes instead of electric, and because they're orange. Every time you lock or unlock one, the app asks the same question: are you close enough? And you have to be. That orange lever will not budge until your actual body is near the actual bike. I found this weirdly moving, which I get is maybe a strange thing to say about a bike app.
Earlier that day, after a long stretch of walking and retailing and sightseeing, we'd found our way to a tucked-away dock. We stayed an hour, alongside a gaggle of Danish teenagers jumping into the cold water, clambering out, sunning, and doing the whole thing again. I told my husband it might be the best part of the trip so far. He said something like, I think things like this are necessary in the modern world — a balm, a way to survive it.
Premature babies can be prescribed something called kangaroo care. You put the baby on a bare chest and leave her there. Her temperature steadies. Her heart rate steadies. Her breathing steadies. When I can't sleep, or there is turbulence on a flight, my hand on my husband's leg sometimes helps. I loved being pregnant, and sort of wish adult sized Baby Bjorns existed.
Most of what we've built runs the other way. Skin contact is inefficient, unpredictable, occasionally dangerous — the abrasion, the contagion — and we have gotten very good at engineering it out.
One of our OG Love Lists included freckle splashes on little kids' noses. I've been thinking about how close you have to be to see one.
Are you close enough? It's a peculiar question to get from a bike app, but I like it.
Xoxo Jill