creating the life we want in the swedish summer

My wife told me the other day that only three percent of Swedes buy their own summer house. However, it’s not that Swedes don’t have summer houses. I would say at least half, if not a huge majority, of people in Stockholm have a place they go to in the country for at least part of their long summer break.

But the houses stay in families, bound by tradition and the home village. There is no American equivalent because Americans don’t have summer cottages like this – cheap and rustic and gorgeous, spread out through this California-sized country with only 10 million people. It explains why I talk to people at work, and some are heading for summer homes six hours away in a flat forest by no body of water.

We are part of that three percent, our old house that used to be split into apartments for two sisters with no water. It is in a clearing down a hill, which protects us from the noise of the trains and the road. We can walk to the lake in five minutes, the beach in ten.

And we chose this, and that makes us proud. We chose not to buy a car, and subsequently chose a house near a train line, like some 19th century vacationers headed for the Catskills out of New York City. We chose not to move to a bigger apartment. We chose to stretch our parental leave. We chose for E to go to grad school. We chose to buy a summer house close enough to her family so they can visit on her birthday.

For a good while there, we didn’t feel like we had a chance to choose much – and I get this feeling about much of modern digital life, that it spins away from a lot of people. And I am now bound by a lack of car, the needs of two toddlers and swarms of mosquitos in the forest shadows. But it is still a good feeling to be living a life that you consciously created, for better or for worse. And right now, with the sun still up at 9pm, with two kids asleep and a sneaky sleepiness coming over me, it is definitely for the better.

end of the endless summer

Our seven-week summer vacation ended today. We left the country yesterday, from the house and expanse of grass to our small city apartment, and Grandma and Grandpa went to the airport for their (much delayed) flight to America. This morning, NK went to daycare, and I headed back to work.

Now that we have kids, I knew that the rhythm of my life would return somewhat to that of childhood, with summer vacations and that tingling nervousness and excitement of September and school (well, in Sweden, August, but it feels like an American September). But, what with all this vacation and parental leave and multiple kids, I got the summer off, so I had that tingling feeling first hand, not second.

Seven weeks is a long time. Long enough for a baby to gain several kilos and really get comfortable in the world, a slightly fussy sausage (to directly translate the Swedish) turned into a beaming Energizer battery sitting and getting up on all fours and smiling and laughing with anyone and everyone. It is long enough for a toddler to noticeably grow and grow up, to get potty trained, to make her first friend over the summer house fence. It is long enough for two parents of young children to get enough space for mushroom picking and fishing and lawn mowing and writing and that is even with the complete breakdown of sleep patterns, toddlers up to 10, babies up at 4, the works.

But order was restored this morning. NK did not want to take out her braids and wash her hair. No, that did not go well. But the rest of the morning did, and the girl who did not want to go to daycare in the spring, was happy to be there this morning, even with the chaos of a new beginning and almost no teachers and just a few familiar faces. And I cleaned up, if taking a shower and shaving and wearing a 30-year-old blue shirt of my father’s counts for cleaning up. And the baby and his mother picked up the wreckage in the apartment, with smiles and songs and a long, long nap.

Here comes the fall. Which is good. Though I can not wait for next summer …

high grass, hard sand and bird bones – stockholm in the summer

This is why we go to the country – to avoid the desert that is Stockholm in the summer. Last summer, on paternity leave with a two-year-old, we roamed playground to playground hunting for kids, any kids. Just to hear the sound of voices and not the creaking of a long-unused swing.

So we joined the exodus to the forest. We came back to town for a few days, and NK needed to play. She missed the slides and the swings. So I took her to one of our regular spots – a daycare that is quite popular on weekends and holidays with regular folk.

It looked as if no one had played there in decades, a sight common in many less-trafficked American playgrounds but not here in stroller-choked Stockholm. The grass was high and the flowers choked with weeds. The sandbox was caked over by rain, a lone toy truck half-buried like something out of Planet of the Apes.

NK ran over to climb a ladder, and then I saw it, the dead bird. Well, the bones of a dead bird. In the middle of the playground, the bird had been dead long enough for only the bones and a few feathers to remain.

I felt alone.

Then NK and I made sand cakes and played in the little log house. And I felt better.

the long night of mosquito massacre

At some point early in the morning, when the Swedish summer night is briefly dark, we lost count of the mosquitos killed, their corpses laid out on window sills, thrown to floors, splashed against the ceiling. Our three-year-old daughter was wide awake, alternately cowering under a blanket, her hands over her ears or holding a flashlight and fly swatter and on the laughing hunt.

Sweden has mosquitos in the summer. It is a fact of life in a wet, wooded country. And we just bought a summer house on a river, downstream from mosquito hell (here is a link to a video). But the mosquitos in our yard were not bad, and even the forest was fine if you keep moving or use mosquito repellent. We had had some annoying nights in the house, getting buzzed by the odd blood sucker. But this night was different, lines of them hanging from the ceiling, coming up from the floor, different types too, from big Star Wars-like cruisers looming in corners to high buzzing small ones impossible to see in the dusk or dark.

It took two hours of the hunt, splitting up into two rooms and many false starts – turn off the lights and wait and, damn, buzzzzzzzzz. Finally we slept. I woke up at one point and checked our one screen window … and killed nine mosquitos. I woke up later and spent the early morning with the baby … and killed another ten. And E in the other bedroom whacked many more than I did.

Then through the day there was this steady drum of mosquitos in the house, even as I vigilantly checked to see what came in when we opened the door. I got paranoid, wondering if they were born in the house somehow, if the previous owners duped us and had sold the house because of the mosquios, how the neighbors coped with these special mosquitos that wiggled through the smallest holes.

We have a family precendent for this. In Port Jervis, we spent a summer of long nights dodging the forest bugs of upstate New York. We blamed the house, and while the house was host to dead rats, bats, batbugs (yes, batbugs) and a host of other problems, these bugs were not its fault. Nope, the next summer, when I reinstalled the air conditioning unit in the old window, I realized there had been two six-inch gaps the entire summer before.

It was like that here again. Like there was a giant hole in the house, a superhighway for mosquitos looking for blood. It was like there was a chimney and the flue was open.

Oh, right. That should be closed. No more mosquitos inside.

Sigh

a long summer stretching back to childhood

We are on a seven week summer vacation, all four of us. It is hard to comprehend, that both E and I get seven weeks of parental leave, each off for one kid (the payoff for scrimping on cash and hoarding our parental leave days, or at least chunks of the 480 we get for each kid).

We have had massive amounts of time off in recent years, and fun to match, but there was always something serious underlying it, whether it be a tough pregnancy or a move across an ocean.

But now we are just a family of four, two parents with a toddler and a baby. We have lots and lots of work, of course, and I should never call this “time off,” but we kind of, sort of know what we are doing now as parents, and we are not moving anywhere.

So now we are, what, four weeks into the vacation, and I have experienced enough for two summers already. With almost three weeks to go! I only had three weeks vacation at my last American job. And I had to negotiate for the third week.

It is like the summer before the seventh grade, without the horrible geeky awkwardness, and without any summer job (those started the summer before the eighth grade). Just time. Here. And there. Boredom and fun. Summer.

the northern light and the beauty of mulch: scenes from the Swedish countryside

Scenes from our summer house …

1. The light. You try putting to bed a restless toddler with a two-hour nap behind her when it is 9 in the evening, and the sun is still shining like mid-afternoon in California. She can stand at the windown and say, “I want to go out,” with a slight whine, and it is not silly, and you can not wait her out either, for it never gets dark enough for that.

My first summer in Sweden, I could not sleep, wide awake at midnight and up at 3am, my body massively confused, a panic worse than any winter so far. I learned to put a t-shirt over my eyes and insist on a dark bedroom.

Toddlers don’t go for that.

2. Long live mulch. We have not owned an engine for two years since the kindly Indian used car guy took our 2001 Chrysler Sebring off our hands for wholesale in Port Jervis (another dealer had refused the car at any price, the problems with that model year so legion).

Now we are the proud owners of a lawn mower, a new yellow Stiga Multiclip 50 Rental (bought on big sale). It makes us nervous – engines break and this one some on first use – but we need it, as we own a little house on a BIG lot, a McMansion lot without the McMansion. The first thing my father-in-law said when he saw the house was, “That’s a lot of grass to cut.” Only the sight of my naked toddler running down the hill behind the house makes it worth it that it took us three days to mow the lawn.

I do like mowing. I hate raking and bagging, an antipathy stretching deep into my childhood. But there is none of that with our Stiga. It has the mulch system, cutting the grass so fine that we do not need to pick it up.

Now maybe I look like an idiot here. I last mowed, oh, 18 years ago, cutting the outfield on my high school baseball field. In Port Jervis, we had a miniscule lawn and a push mower. So maybe you all have the mulch system. Maybe you have all had it for the last 15 years. Maybe this is old news.

But not to me. To me, mulch is freedom.