by the seaside with strawberries

Coffee, wild strawberries, waffles with jam and cream, a cheeseburger.

The day in a menu, on  the Island.

The entertainment consisted of a vintage boat race of the type that is popular around here, with traditional old fishing boats being sailed or rowed, the crews dressed in vintage fishing garb. We only witnessed the start of the race, as the finishing line is across the pond, in Sweden.

 But the sight of twenty-odd wooden boats setting sail towards the horizon is awe-inspiring. Even when the day is grey and overcast.

The company consisted of a pathologist who handles corpses for a living ( no pun intended ), a politician on his way to Brussels to do some lobbying in EU headquarters, and true Islanders: chatty, motherly women who always try to feed you and men of the strong and silent type.

secrets and sense-making

Seven years and seven hundred entries in this blog.

I'm celebrating with hot honey water.

You may not know it, but this is  a secret blog.  None of the people I spend my real life with know I even have one. I can't explain why I haven't even told my best friend - I just know that I couldn't write as freely as I do if I knew that she (however unjudgmental and supportive) was reading it.

Why not? Most of the things I write are no secrets to her anyway. And why the need for a public blog, as opposed to keeping a normal diary (which I do too) or letting my writings just sit on my hard drive? I like getting comments from strangers but I write even when I don't get any.

I use this blog to catalogue my life and try to make sense of it. To reassure myself that there are patterns and reasons and meaning in it. To be able to look back and see that interesting and funny things have happened, even though I doubt it sometimes. To remember the days of my life in Finland. To encourage someone. To leave something behind (if the internet doesn't die before I do). To have a creative outlet.

To survive, even.

time for the magnets

You know you're on vacation when you stop to rearrange your fridge magnets.

won't let the sun go down on me

Finland is gearing up for one of its biggest holidays (second only to Christmas) -  Midsummer.  Only a short holiday, really just a three-day weekend, but it encompasses all of the Finnish people's love for summer. A short and sweet summer that has to fulfill all its promises. These days, the sun never goes down, so the Finns don't either.

In the office, people are impatient and restless, sights already set on Thursday afternoon, when the office door will slam shut behind us as we take off. The ritual is the same for most of us: we will be stuffing our cars or boats full of food to be barbecued, alcohol to be drunk, children, spouses, dogs and/or friends, and then leaving the city for summer cottages, beaches and camp grounds.

We ignore the possibility of our barbecues and boat trips being ruined by rain or mosquito invasions. We know that dozens of people will drown or be hit by drunk drivers this weekend, but never believe it will be us. In our plans for the weekend, the sun always shines, children are happy and the steaks are grilled to perfection.

Midsummer madness, this year aggravated by a super moon, here we come.

the lady of the wigs

Today's feature: character out of my past, namely the awe-inspiring  Saga.

Wig-selling lady of a certain age, of a certain wealth. Owned a city-centre flat that I and two friends wanted to rent when we first arrived in the beautiful city of Turku to study at the university. Suspiciously told us she did not approve of renting out to students and that her husband would be very upset if she did. Agreed at last, after having my friend's mother sign a personal guarantee that we wouldn't wreck the flat.

Abandoned her doubts about us after a while, possibly after we sent her flowers for Christmas. Gave us hair products in return. Took us out in her silver BMW to a second-hand furniture store when we told her we wanted to buy a sofa. Firmly disapproved of the sofa we picked out, so we returned empty-handed. Chewed out the building manager on our behalf when he dared to voice a complaint about us.

Gently refused, after three harmonious years as our landlady, to renew our contract when we told her one of us was moving out and someone else was coming instead. Instead, went flat-hunting on our behalf as the remaining two of us were out of town for the summer. Picked out a flat, which we rented without ever having seen. (When rental agency showed unwillingness to take on us students, she threatened to remove her own business from them, and they caved.) Proved to us that we were right to trust her.

Is fondly remembered still, many years later. Possibly still selling wigs in her dusty backstreet shop.

the nights of deliberate living

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately..."
(H.D. Thoreau)

Every night, around midnight, I took my big black Labrador and walked down the well-lit suburban street and turned into an unlit gravel road that led through a patch of woods. It wasn't a long road - you walked past a few stray houses on one side and a couple of minutes later you reached a little grocery shop sitting right next to a busy highway, and the road ended there.

On the side of the road that had no houses there were only trees. A tiny  patch of woods,  and I loved to hide in there. Even though you could see the road on one side, an abandoned saw-mill on the other and a house on the third, when you stood among the tall pine trees you felt secluded and sheltered. I remembered playing there with my best friend as a kid, mostly pretending to be Indians or wild animals in a vast forest wilderness, climbing on fallen tree trunks and large rocks. Even as a grown-up, I could still feel the magic and fantasy shimmering in the air, making me shiver with delight.

My midnight walks were pitch-black and icy in the winter, and I used to lean against a certain old pine tree - my dream tree, because even in the dead of winter there was the warmth of life in its bark and I felt stronger just for touching it. I could see the stars, which in my Star Trek-fueled dreams symbolized the ultimate adventure. If I was lucky, there were even the Northern Lights. And I could watch the highway from a distance - nearly empty at this hour, but every now and then a lorry broke the stillness, thundering past on its way to marvellous cities and countries I would someday get to see.


In the white nights of summer, I would kick off my shoes and climb barefoot onto a big rock, still warm from the sun. The sky was bright but the dreams were no less present.

These were my teenage night walks, where I planned my future adventures and believed absolutely everything.

( Picture from scenicreflections .com )