We missed this at first go, as my kids got bored about mediocre song number 20. But this musical number from the show pretty much sums up Sweden … and you have to love the men with strollers (about 3 minutes in).
I also wrote a post for Quartz about Eurovision, calling the competition to pick the Swedish winner the Swedish equivalent to March Madness.
More work from my five-year-old daughter, this time … portraiture.
Of Tigger. Notice the thoughtful composition and contrast with a princess purse and a Swiss book about flowers.
And then a different kind of animal shot: dragon with little brother.
More photos from my daughter, who goes on these picture-taking sprees with her beat up Fisher Price camera with the worst lens ever.
I gotta get her a real camera. These are not necessarily the best, just the clearest. But they still have a certain preschool je ne sais quois …
There has been a self-portrait phase. Notice the dress from when she was two years old, plus the one glove, a la Michael Jackson. Very funky.
In the laundry room.
We still like hearts, though less than before.
She also likes to photograph details from books and her own drawings. These are usually beyond her high-powered Fisher Price, but this flower detail came out beautifully.
The spring of five colds
Plus a burst ear drum and the flu
We watched ice melt through the window
Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year.
The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc.
In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life.”
LeRoy Pollock, in a letter to his 16-year-old son Jackson, in 1928, from Lapham’s Quarterly via Brain Pickings.
Soft ice lingers in shadow
The Arctic wind is damp
Wild-eyed kids know its time to dig
This week it seemed like spring in Stockholm. The snow is melting, leaving thin sheets of ice over the shadowy depressions in our park. There are green shoots poking through the earth, and the temperature got into the high 40’s probably.
But I am not deceived. I know the winter will return.
But it will be what Swedes call spring winter. This is mostly a northern mountain phrase, but to a Californian it goes for Stockholm as well. It is the time of year when the sun is returning but the winter refuses to go.
In years past it has been the hardest time of year. My body feels the winter ending, feels the sun warming my closed eyelids as I stand and face the heat. But the winter does not end. I still dress the children in snowsuits, I still bundle up, my feet still freeze.
It seemed like spring stalled, leaving me in a winter limbo.
I am a minority on this, I think. People seem to love spring winter, getting to ski in the sun, camp and ice skate, that sort of thing.
And this year I get that. I get spring winter. I have finally been in Sweden long enough for my soul to calibrate not to the snow, not to the temperature but to the sun.
The sun returns slowly, inching forward, but then near the end of February seeming to come 10 minutes earlier each day and linger well after we have come back from work and preschool.
In Sweden they do not measure seasons by the calendar but by the weather. So spring comes when the temperature is above freezing for so many days in a row. That sort of thing.
But that does not reflect the joy of the sun returning, even behind overcast clouds, even in a freezing wind like today. So we get spring winter. And I get to know that in less than three weeks, we will be tipping over the spring equinox and suddenly days here will be longer than in the US.
And that brings the promise of summer and of the forest and the blueberries and the lake by our summer cottage and riding my bike to the country store miles away.
