2025: the year of museums, misery and a dead eagle

2025 was a year of heavy burdens, My mother was disintegrating, my chosen profession and financial security were disintegrating. I struggled, exhausted, to hold them together, 

There was mother trouble with hospitals, cancer and the relief of moving her into a care home. I missed out on two company parties and a road trip due to illness and funerals. I spent a lot of time processing disappointment, loneliness and the fear of an eye disease. I played volleyball and went to the gym - when I could find the time. I became highly sensitive to emotional pain and cried a lot. I considered deactivating my company and started looking for other jobs.

I also found inspiration in my studies and took on my first coaching clients. I found a bit more faith and trust in God. 

I read 146 books. I had a museum card, a Christmas gift that kept on giving throughout the year: history, art and new perspectives.

Regular social events: quarterly reports (i.e. parties) with industrial friends, Nasty Club almost-original edition, food and TV with sister, choir rehearsals and concerts (sometimes in three languages), meetings with my "life women" in church, in cafés, in the woods, at the bowling alley. 

Highlights:

* New Year's Day: tears and poetry.

* A very large needle and the discovery that I'm not scared of very large needles.

* Translating for the Israeli ambassador, under heavy security.

* Best friend's 50th birthday with venison and quirky women.

* Concerts that all taught me something: big band jazz (that I still don't like big band jazz), a lute concert (what a lute sounds like), the Gloria Mass (what heavenly music sounds like).

* Local talents in the Eurovision Song Contest, a watching party with friends and dogs and guinea pigs and screaming out loud.

* Learning how to chop a pencil in two, using only one finger.

* Road trip to J-stad, to study dried flowers from Napoleon's grave and ancient manchurian cherry trees.

* Birthday: sunny lunch with a friend, vegan burger dinner with another friend, and a mimosa.

* Hiking among spring flowers and howling wolves.

* Turku weekend with sister and brother-in-law: the castle, Cloister Hill, Indian food, a riverside picnic, giggling breakfast table quizes.

* Coach get-together in a café, with veterans and students.

* Midsummer as usual, plus a long talk with a best friend in the chilly summer night, under a crystal chandelier.

* Kuddnäs and the history and culture of my ancestors.

* Waffle-selling at a church conference, a social success. Hugged a puppy, gave away my ear-rings to tweens, discussed cardigans and demons and other important things.

* Sunny, lazy days on the beach, with exhaustion and sorrow and great joy. Alone and with important people.

* Improvised road trip along dusty country roads, with family members. A country fair, a hardware store, icecream, a river, a weird elf village.

* Three boat trips. Two for sun and swimming and euphoria, one to fetch a dead eagle and send it in the post as a very weird package.

* Funeral of yet another beloved aunt, which meant quality time with aunts and cousins, in a village far, far away in the mysterious eastern forests.

* Weekend in quaint old town of Kristinestad. Summer heat and thunder, garden cafés, friends, a church conference, sleeping in a hundred-year-old cottage.

* Wheelchair excursions with increasingly weak but cheerful mother, to look at flowers and buy icecream. One last trip to the summer paradise to kick off our shoes and have coffee on the beach.

* Night of the Arts: from exhaustion and back-ache to the comfort of friends and a glass of red wine.

* Renovation of the summer cottage: emptying cupboards, painting walls and kitchen cabinets, finding treasures, throwing away trash and generally getting to know the Sixties and Seventies.

* Last night of summer: with family and the younger generation and the usual nostalgia, on the beach.

* Clearing out parts of my mother's flat, finding more childhood trash and treasures and insights into my parent's past. 

* Autumn with too much work, besides mother troubles and studies. PPE, army gear translations with AI help, Finnish for Swedes and doubting my ability to speak my own language.

* Meeting a therapy dog: the instant cure for every possible ailment was one look into those deep brown eyes.

* American-style Thanksgiving dinner and improvisation theatre - two new experiences on the same weekend.

* Concert with three student choirs straight out of my past.

* Stomach flu, just in time to miss the most expensive dinner of the year.

* Extremely local Christmas party: folk dancing, accordions and bilingualism.

* Traditional Independence Day with gingerbread cookie baking, this time with mental health issues, tears and traumatic experiences.

* My first coaching client sessions, during dark December evenings - feeling lost and inspired.

* Trip to Umeå with friend: shopping, cafés, rain, old books, great food and an awesome view from our hotel window.

* Delivering Christmas packages with a teenager, getting lost in the maze of poverty.

* Christmas eve, twice: love, wobbly singing and a trip in a wheel-chair-accessible taxi.

* New Year's Eve just like half a lifetime (literally) ago: freezing cold, church youngsters in a school building. Then back to my chosen life with fireworks, champagne and Tennyson.

my mother's last day on the beach

In August I took my mother on her last trip ever to the summer cottage. 

She is 91 years old, with grave dementia and various other ailments that have now confined her to a wheelchair most of the time. Despite some help, I have almost run myself into the ground trying to take care of her during the last couple of years. 

We had coffee on the beach, watched the birds, enjoyed the sun. She insisted on taking off her shoes and socks - loving the barefoot feeling, just like me. She was happy.

Pushing the wheelchair over the uneven lawn and helping her get to the outdoor toilet completely wore me out. I held back my tears until I was alone. 

So I decided this was my mother's last time at her beloved cottage, where she has spent so many happy summers. She won't miss it - she doesn't remember it when she's not there, and she was content to go home. 

But I grieve for her. She is slowly leaving me.

there's still my joy for Christmas day

A red candelabra, ghosts and longing, learning a new game, wheelchair transports, work, buying slippers for a dying mother, food and great people, deep sorrow and a love that grows for every year. 

There is no snow. And I probably don't need more than three hyacinths in the house.

One tiny child can change the world

One shining light can show the way

For all my tears, for what I've lost

There's still my joy

There's still my joy

For Christmas day

(Indigo Girls)

store up your warmth and your thoughts

“The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It's a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you've got in as many supplies as you can. It's nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won't find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.”

(Tove Jansson: Moominvalley in November)

flamingo flower and fiddle-leaf fig

Flamingo flower and fiddle-leaf fig: what an effing tongue-twister I found when I adopted two homeless houseplants.

first-time traveller: destination Utrecht

I'm 16 years of age and on my first real trip to a foreign country.

My childhood trips to neighbouring Sweden and Norway with my parents don't really count. I've heard my friends talk about holidays around the Mediterranean and I'm wildly jealous. My longing for foreign travel awoke years ago, and steadily grows as I pore over the world atlas (a wonderful book). My wanderlust is not even hindered by planetary boundaries, because Star Trek makes even interstellar journeys seem possible. 

But my hunger for adventure is hobbled by the fact that I'm not at all an adventurous person.

My two best friends (equally inexperienced travellers) come up with the idea to join an arranged trip to a huge, international Christian youth conference. Conveniently, we can get on a chartered bus close to our home in Finland and it will take us all the way there and back. This is why my first real trip abroad goes to a place I've never heard of: Utrecht. It's in the Netherlands.

We get on the bus. It's filled with other young people going to the same conference, but they all speak Finnish. We're Swedish speakers with shaky language skills, so we nervously keep to ourselves. The trip takes three days, non-stop. One night we sleep in a cabin on the ferry to Sweden, one night we snooze in the bus.

I'm 16 and the whole world is new and unknown. Nearly everything is a first-time experience.

* Copenhagen: we stop for while on a dark December evening, just to walk around Stroget and all the neon lights. My first time in a country where I don't really understand the language spoken around me.

* Germany: it's night and I need sleep, but I wake up every now and then, just to peer in wonder at a dark landscape I can barely see through the mud-spattered bus window, and tell myself, "I'm in Germany!"

* Passport control (there are none between the Nordic countries): no need to exit the bus. Intimidating, burly men stomp down the aisle and frown at everyone's passport. Mine is brand new.

* Sleeping in your seat on a crowded bus: it's possible, when you're young and exhausted. I barely notice the various ferry rides between countries, or the shocking news of Ceausescu's fall.

* The youth conference: there are 10 000 participants, so it's more than ten times bigger than any event I've ever attended. Information packs and brochures are available in about ten different languages (including tiny ones such as Swedish and Finnish). There are people from almost every European country. There are food stands selling snacks from almost every European country. The facility is massively bigger than any building I've ever seen. The girls' accommodation area is an immense hall furnished with thousands of mattresses. For the main meetings, all 10 000 attendants crowd into the same hall. There's simultaneous interpretation into our own language. 

* Eating with thousands of others, brushing my teeth with dozens of others around the same (very long) sink, making friends from other countries, bonding around the fact that the hall is cold and the rented blankets smell of horses. And they all have the same faith as me - I'm used to being part of a small minority that is sneered at by my peers. During the days we attend Bible study, missions seminars, national meetings (with Finns) and language-group meetings (with Swedes). We spend the nights chatting, singing and dancing in crowds of strangers. A few of our friends from home are also there, older boys who are supposed to keep an eye on us, but they soon give up.

* The rest of the Netherlands: we venture out into Utrecht, to have Chinese food and check out the shops. We pay with guilders and try oliebollen. We do a brief tour of Amsterdam, walking among the canals and giggling in the Rijksmuseum until frowning security guards start following us around. Even the grey, damp December weather is novel to me, since I associate travel with summer and December with snow.

* Hamburg: a long stop where we try to do some shopping, but then everything closes early and we resort to people-watching and giggling at McDonald's.

* Sleeping on the bus floor on the way home, freezing cold, and being stepped on by people. 

I come home about a week later, exhausted and with a cough, in the first days of 1990. I haven't managed to see very much of Europe and the Netherlands, apart from what I've glimpsed through mud-streaked bus windows. 

But I've met the whole of Europe. I've done my first real foreign travelling. 

final report of summer 2025

A car with a locked wheel, mental mentor meeting, almost moving my mother into a care home, three weeks of full-time vacation, several weeks of half-time vacation, almost every weekend at the cottage, fetching a dead eagle from a deserted island and sending it by post, two magical boat trips to summer islands, a little family time, lots of alone time, pondering vocational singleness, a small but exquisite church concert, Midsummer celebration as usual, Kuddnäs and the history of Topelius, selling crêpes at a church conference, wheelchair excursions with my mother, grilling sausages on a rainy day, books, a heatwave so strong it melted glue in the bathroom, weariness and tears, road trip to Pensala and Purmo and a country fair in Jeppo, cottage renovations, funeral of a beloved aunt, Kristinestad with friends, garden cafés and the most gorgeous B&B I've ever stayed in, the Stundars museum, a month-long break from TV, Night of the Arts with yarn crafts and decadent red wine, my mother's last trip to her favourite place, end-of-summer celebration, hospital visits.

I am made of words & rivers & winds & wildflowers. 

I am part grief & part hope & all love.

(Victoria Erickson)