Over the years, my husband Eric and I travelled to Sweden and grew to love the country where his parents were born.
We loved the long summer days and felt an affinity to the country’s social concerns and neutrality policies.
On one trip, I sat on a plane and read Noam Chomsky’s 9-11. In it, he placed the September 11 attacks in context and traced the history of the American intervention in the Middle East and throughout Latin America as well as Indonesia, Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan. I realized how collusive the United States was in the wars of the world including the latest in Iraq.
I told Eric: “Let’s buy house in Sweden. It’ll be an adventure for us, and I want a place out of the United States in case our grandsons ever need to leave. Even though there’s no more draft, why take the chance of it being reinstated?”
The time was right for this new pursuit. Eric immediately echoed my desire, and we set about finding a little yellow house with foliage covering pretty much everything. The quiet was so deep in the middle of the short, dark nights as Eric, and I sat together during hours of jetlag. We often listened to the quiet and saw the first glimpse of sun come up at 3 a.m. as we heard cuckoos and owls call out.
We cleaned and built, hauled away junk, and cut trees, pulled weeds that grew every year to above our heads, and made that house a place we loved and visited every summer.
I’ll never forget the nights I pulled out my rusty pink three-speed, a leftover from the previous owner, and lashed my bicycle pump onto the rack behind the seat and jumped on: I had to make it to the lake by sunset.
I rode past the long open fence next to the driveway where our neighbor’s two Rottweilers lunged and growled, my heart beating wildly. Even though I knew they couldn’t escape, I felt they could. They followed me around the long drive until I passed their gate as my bike skidded a little left, a little right, on the gravel road.
As I looked to the right, I saw a small pool of water covering the low-lying fern-covered marsh.
On the paved road, I felt like I was flying as I rode with no hands on the handlebars like I did when I was a kid. I sped up, knowing it was almost sunset and I had to get to the lake by 9:30 if I wanted to see it on these warm Swedish mid-summer nights.
Lake Vesterjorn awaited me as I rode through the woods looking toward the lake—to catch glimpses of the sky between the dark dense forest, the depth of those trees planted so close together their inner branches were brown because they didn’t see light. I saw a moss-covered rock demarcation and wondered how many years the moss had grown there and who had stacked those rocks.
The sky above the trees was already orange, not pink, a deep fruit color, and I knew it was almost time. I dropped the bike, running toward the water as I looked toward the west at the blazing sun—my whole body feeling the beauty of the ending of the day.
The sky was alive in light as I watched it drop below the horizon: another day done, gone the sun as the military taps say. Another rotation complete. Just when I knew I wouldn’t see a more beautiful sight, I noticed the little rowboat with its solitary rower—still like me just sitting. The afterglow intensified as orange became red and spread out.
Sometimes Eric and I rode out together, but I often rode alone. Alone, I didn’t have to say words to explain how I felt because they were inadequate; sometimes moments are unutterable on the lips or on paper. In my life, those moments were the openness in my daughter’s eyes at birth and in Eric’s when we first fell in love.
There was something magical I could try to describe, but I felt even deeper inside me: that place of hiding, but also of tenderness and love, and so much beauty.
Our oldest grandson Nick spent weeks with us during his difficult teenaged years and he found ease and comfort in the forest and the land where he found acceptance. When his brother Max later joined us, he told us he found his “happy place.”
After one summer together, I watched Nick lie on the ground and kiss the earth as we said our last goodbye for the summer.
~
author: Bonnie O’Brien Jonsson
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Lisa Erickson
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