Kids t-shirt
By age six he already knew who was coming up the street before he even looked out the window: this kids' raven t-shirt features Hrafn, a postman in an Icelandic village of corrugated-iron houses and a street painted in colors. It's from my Animal Kinhood series, where the animals dress and live like people.
Foto: Roger Worden / UnsplashCorvus corax
If the pass opens, I go up. If it doesn't, I go up tomorrow.
An extreme generalist: boreal forest, coast, steppe, mountain, Arctic tundra and desert across almost the whole northern hemisphere. In Iceland it is a year-round resident, even in midwinter, on sea cliffs, in fjords and around the edges of towns.
Amma Guðrún lives two streets down and used to sing him a very old song when he was little, about the one who slept in the crack of the cliff, the one the houses of the east used to sing when bad weather was coming. He learned it whole before he could read. Now he only remembers the first part and hums it in the van without noticing, and hums it terribly. His grandmother knows the whole thing, and she reminds him of it.
Raven trivia: they fly upside down for good stretches, do barrel rolls in the air, drop into dives just because, and when there's snow, they slide down slopes, climb back up, and do it again. Nobody fully knows why they do it. Hrafn's valley has snow for half the year and no shortage of slopes; what he does with those slopes is drive up them in a van, with the mail in the back.
