Snusmumriken

I started school when I was six. The walk to school takes ten minutes, but I was fully able to spend a full hour, seeing as there were cats and bugs and trees and snow; dead hedgehogs, grafitti and bottles that could be exchanged with sweets if we were lucky enough to find one.

The way home passed through the subwalk under the railway, and it was there that i discovered Art. I had that little children’s book that was supposed to make me like Monet, but i didn’t like monet and his pale smudgy colours. My kindergarden had shown us paintings, thinking that this would make cultivated persons out of us, but i didn’t like that either. Art that’s supposed to be accessible for children is more often than not dull, bland and too accessible to give any pleasure to a kid. Kids have imagination, and lots of it, thus inventive paintings of flowers and animals rarely do the trick.

But one of the walls in the subwalk was covered in grafitti. Blues and greens and purples, and moss and mushrooms. Mostly fleinsopp (the magical kind), but some round ones, some flat ones and some covered in green moss. I used to stop in front of it just to look at it, because i found it so beautyful. I didn’t know anything about magical mushrooms, but i did know that the painting on the wall was perfect, and that it described my own impression of what a forest really was like. It made hte subwalk feels like a moist and foresty cave. Underneath, it said “Mushrooms” in big, bold letter. I didn’t know what it meant, but i remember saying it aloud several times. It's a beautyful word, mushrooms. It’s almost strange to think that it’s the same as the norwegian “sopp”.

The mushrooms were soon covered by people’s lame and uninventive name tags. I wondered who could get themself to do such a thing. After some years, the walls of the underground started to fall off, and since that, it’s been repainted with white, grey or purple almost every year. I was so upset then that my Dad had to assure me that the grafitti would come back “they had to fix it” he said “It was so wet that paint didn't stay on the walls anyway. There will be new grafitti” he said. I wish it had been true, and that there had been new pieces, and new six year olds to discover pictorial art for the first time.

Fredrikstad people. Do you remember this one? I thought it was awsome.