Smiling over cups of sunshine coffee.
Crying over chirping baby birds.
Wrestling with old thundercloud worries.
Suffocating of rage and shame on on hot, sleepless nights.
Falling into the euphoria of a breeze through flower fields.
There are so many emotions in a summer.
A party for a 92-year-old in an old attic, with photos from the 30s and family skeletons dug up (not literally).
An Easter Sunday dentist's appointment, the St John Passion, volunteering at a church youth conference and being ridiculously extrovert. Helsinki weekend with art, natural history museum and a lazy Seurasaari walk.
Poetry night in a wine bar. A loud gospel concert that included "This Little Light Of Mine" (a favourite). Reanimation of our book club, taking apart Gatsby in an Irish pub.
Birthday weekend with naked cake and three parties. 100-year anniversary celebration for a church - a hundred years of music, lovely people and some weird opinions.
Last part of coach training - creating a relaxation program, speed-writing a speech, saying heart-breaking goodbyes. And doing a lot of coaching. Insights: I can do public speaking and may even want to, I crave intellectual challenge, and coaching real people is hard.
The spring ended with almost a crash - stress and exhaustion, grief over my uncle's death, trauma over sudden illness in the family (again).
I've been strong for too long. I stagger into summer, weakly, in tears.
This winter was cold enough to crack the stars, swirl crystal dust all over blue sunsets and plant ice rainbows in the middle of a frozen sea.
My first coaching clients patiently endured my attempts to help. A well-worn copy of Non-Violent Communication turned my worldview upside down. Among my mother's clothes, I found 14 berets. Something pulled me into church on Sundays.
Accordion music reverbated through my senses at a community Christmas party. A trip to Umeå soaked me in rain, greyness, books, deep conversations with my best friend, trendy food, strange art, the Swedish language and an involuntary bus tour through all the suburbs.
I dived desperately into a week's Christmas holiday, celebrated two shining family dinners, had champagne on New Year's Eve. Snow covered the rest of the season. I froze my toes at a graffiti exhibition in an abandoned railway warehouse in the depth of winter. Qvevri wine with a hearty Georgian meal warmed me up, as well as a noisy pub night with friends.
The Olympic Games convinced me that ice-skaters are the most impressive athletes. A rereading of my favourite crime writer got me through February and a consultation with my coaching teacher got me through my own doubts.
I emerge out of another winter, as always bleary-eyed and surprised. The cold melts under a rosy sun.
Cold air creeping closer. Blue shadows stretching across white ice fields. Electricity is very expensive today.
I can't go out because it's minus fifteen degrees Celsius, and I really want to go for a walk.
I wish it were still Christmas, but I look forward to a Shrove Tuesday bun.
My work today included reflective harness design, website spelling mistakes, birth injuries.
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.
Flamingo flower and fiddle-leaf fig: what an effing tongue-twister I found when I adopted two homeless houseplants.
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)
Sleeping in peaceful, dark rooms. Books. Vanilla milkshakes. Candles. Women who know God. A weekend in a foreign city. Church windows. A little wine. Walks among birds and the smell of leaves. Celebrations. Star Trek. Making music. Love.
How to sneak up on a whooping swan, send a dead eagle through the mail, watch an almost entire match of women's football: things I've learned this summer.
How to enjoy extreme heat, structure a holiday well so it doesn't end in tears, handle a boat: things I've still not learned this summer.
Party season with lots of cake, a horrible flu, hiking among quiet lakes, a trip to Jeppis, several museums, a joyful Easter lunch, a Sunday morning in a country church, elation over our very own boy band KAJ in the Eurovision, balcony sun, subtitling annoying children's shows and testing AI translation, studying attitude and flow, afternoon tea, a choral concert straight out of heaven, a big-band jazz concert I endured, combing my hair differently, wondering if setting goals is against my faith, meeting a roebuck, hearing a wolf pack howl, singing in three languages, a Star Trek binge, a Turku weekend with history and sun and my favourite castle and my favourite people.
Edit: the wolf pack might have been a husky pack. But I won't let the truth stand in the way of a good story.
May projects: take hundreds of walks in the woods, smell the flowers, sing with the birds, sing with a choir, watch Eurovision Song Contest, throw a party, go to one of my favourite cities, go to my favourite cabin in the woods, try to postpone my usual summer breakdown.
April projects: enjoy Easter, spend no money at all, learn French, let go of worrying, do fun stuff (without spending money), deal with my inner child, celebrate my birthday, get serious about sugar, buy a laptop (preferably without spending money).
Piece of cake. (For my birthday - not sugarfree!)
Mild winter, extreme translation-related stress, course weekends, a gleaming Christmas with a fragrant Christmas tree, lots of time curled up with a book, existential anxiety, choir practice, eight-hour industry work weeks, kind-of poverty.
New experiences: an overnight stay alone in an empty hotel in a blizzard, distributing Christmas packages to the poor, acting as private interpreter for an ambassador.
A winter of worries - work, health, money. Apart from a gleaming Christmas and a few fascinating course weekends, I'd rather forget most of it.
But mountains have been moved for me. It's time to live, listen to the birds, and write sometimes.
I have washed puppy pee from my jeans and sang I see a red door and I want it painted black...
Science and princes with ancient table manners, glamorous dresses and food ...
A yellow light flashing, a steel door gliding open by itself. Shouted loudly come out and play ...
Oh ye'll take the high road and I'll take the low road
and I'll be in Scotland a'fore ye
I cry for the loss of love when what I really mean is the loss of warmth. Love is found in the sun. Late bloomer, they said once. What about never-bloomer?
I'm already in eternity, just a few more bumps in the road before heaven opens up.
Clutching a double-shot cappuccino like a lifeline, trying to focus on a book. Listening to the Eastern-European guys ...
A gentle hand steadied me.
... on a quest for God's love and an easy breath.
... obliquely through the dandelion clocks around us ...
Pandemic restrictions have been lifted and I can go to church again, if I want. I don't know if I want.
"Let's go to France this summer and explore castles and drink red wine," a friend said.
December is another planet than June.
They say there might not be enough electricity this winter, and is there a good way to finish this blog entry? No, there isn't.
There was a woman, once. This is not my story.
This month has heaped miseries upon me. What I long for right now:
Joy, peace, Christmas, chocolate, the good old days when I curled up on the couch and wrote, my father, dinner with friends, dogs, childhood, weeks of rest surrounded by books, easy health, a feeling of invincibility, God, my university days, fastlagsbullar with lots of cream, the feeling of falling in love, the smell of turf smoke in an Irish village on a winter's day, birdsong.
2024 was the year I only just dragged my business through another crisis year, launched my skills on a foreign market, started training my mind for new trade.
I found a new gym and a real choir - and found my voice, after decades of silence. I took up volleyball again, against better judgment and wobbly knees. I gave up cheese and took strict control over my money.
The winter was six months long and everyone important to me seemed to suffer from serious illness. There was constant struggle and worry for a 90-year-old with broken bones, dementia and loneliness. She didn't really feel like my mother anymore. The spring was a bit easier, summer peaceful. Work and money ran out in the autumn, bringing stress along with new challenges and a new direction.
It was the year I read 137 books and (according to Spotify) listened to royalcore concert band classical and academic strut pop, once for a whole day straight. I rediscovered my love for the Swedish language.
Highlights:
* New Year with friends, pizza and prosecco.
* Graffiti art exibition in an abandoned warehouse in freezing cold - a ghost town and fairytale in one. The kind of art I enjoy. Wandered around wearing double-layer wool and winter boots. Spooky funfair games, broken dolls, fairy lights in discarded boots, monsters, urinals and everything spray-painted.
* Joining a choir, a version of the one I lived in and loved 30 years ago. Loved this one too. Good for the soul and the soul voice.
* Funeral of a beloved aunt, among many other beloved aunts and uncles. My sister and I attended, feeling newly orphaned. The old and wise took us in, embraced us in their love. A church with ancient avenging angels in the ceiling, coffee in venerable poet Topelius' home.
* Age signs: christening of my second grand-niece, laser treatment of my eye, my first ever permanent medication.
* Helsinki weekend with friends, wine, Finnish pentecostals, great food, a twilight walk in icy Eira, the National Library, hunt for the most atmospheric café.
* "Rainbow mass" that I attended out of curiosity.
* Last evening in the town's only (almost) real Irish pub before it closed for renovation. Joyful dancing with a friend, meaningful conversation with my brother.
* Deepening crisis in the garment industry, losing customers and suppliers, not amenably.
* Discovery, by my dentist, of my first ever tooth cavity since the late Eighties.
* Choir weekend with hundreds of singers, two fun concerts and an unexpected icecream break in the snow.
* Sand from the Sahara that rained down on my car.
* Trip to Larsmo to look at a boat and a spring flood. Played a car game that involved heavy accents and collision avoidance.
* South African evening with rusk, lots of interesting facts and the sales price of giraffes.
* Trip of the year, a week in Spain: the Alhambra, tapas, history, sun, swifts and oranges, and a decadent life.
* Birthday: a gorgeous Andalusian dawn with both sun and moon, a champagne party on a plane with a view over Atlantic sand dunes, a good friend and Washington Irving's fairytales, a dinner eaten standing up on a train going 170 kph.
* My first book fair: history, crime fiction, fantasy, and recruiting a published author to our book club.
* Two funerals in one day, involving many tears and the bishop of Burma.
* Dinner with cousins, aunts and uncles - lots of love, home and belonging. Much needed.
* Barbecue and angling lessons on a summer's eve. The fish didn't bite, fortunately.
* Picnics and brunches with praying women, easing this year's feelings of loneliness.
* Massive air show with fighter jets, tanker aircraft and serious-looking helicopters. None of them crashed, despite their complicated maneuvers and my predictions, but I was almost killed by the shuttle bus to the car park.
* Luxury brunch with best friend, under some stuffed deer heads. It started with mimosas and ended with a chocolate fountain.
* Midsummer with the Midsummer people, some old-new additions and a very pregnant cat. Sometimes it's a wonderful feeling to be surrounded by people who all went to the same school at the same time and know the same things.
* Various road trips with mother - a favourite pastime for us both. (I made it my summer project to visit as many summer cafés as possible.) Other trips, with various people, saw Kaskö and the famous greenhouse restaurant, Kokkola and a summer yardsale in the idyllic old town, and phenomena such as old church ladies, honeybeer and the only British warship ever lost to the enemy (i.e. the Finns, who probably were as surprised by this as the Brits).
* Bubbles, good food and sangria nightlife by the seafront, with my industrial cohorts K & K.
* Guided cemetery tours: this summer's educational project (alongside reading Leo Tolstoy's shortest novel, very short indeed). Learned, among many other things, that ghosts of musicians like to play Mozart's "Sleigh Ride" and that my home town has many interesting characters.
* A day spent sipping various drinks at various sidewalk cafés with various people - perfection!
* The Olympics in Paris: watching weird sports on a laptop in the wilderness cottage.
* Night of the Arts: a viking ship, tacos, secret orders, rich red wine and the usual magnificent chaos.
* Unusual nature observations: two hares in a boxing match, a baby cuckoo, egrets.
* Close encounter with a venomous snake: almost picked it up with my bare hands. Not on purpose.
* A fight lost against AI (bad AI-generated subtitling): also lost a lot of work, and a lot of work motivation, as a result.
* Fourth funeral of the year, this time finding family love among my mother's cousins.
* Dramatic end to the summer cottage season: after a long, lonely but wonderful summer, I came home in September by bus, my car by tow truck. I decided then that summer was definitely over.
* Mental trainer course: new career I suddenly decided to embark on, maybe. Fascinating subject, weekends with fascinating people, a lot of soul searching.
* Rock gig at the jazz club.
* Exploration of the very small town of Vörå - a mountain, fake Roman ruins, runes.
* A garage roof project I was called in to help with: complicated and kind of fun, with teenagers and single ladies and a darkening evening.
* Battle against cholesterol and against doctors who disagreed about my cholesterol.
* Battle against subtitling software, extremely demoralizing.
* Tampere weekend with sister: cafés, chasing famous donuts, a museum, Indian food, cozy evenings with cozy crime series, pear truffles from the best chocolate shop in the world.
* African birthday celebration in a blizzard, with power cuts and a pro cake.
* Software license, extremely expensive, bought from a nice Danish lady to kickstart my new career as a subtitler for Swedish TV.
* A night in a horror movie setting: me and a friend all alone in an unstaffed hotel, in the middle of nowhere, in a blizzard. I slept peacefully.
* Volunteering for a charity project: taking food and Christmas presents to suffering families, receiving beautiful smiles in return. Also found my way blocked by a gigantic horse.
* Christmas days: family celebration of the coziest kind, a dinner with former Afghan missionaries and TV producers, a brunch with firefighters and bohemians, and a trip to the last outpost on the Ostrobothnian plains where an eerie purple light shines over snow and traditional hymns are combined with mulled wine around a fire pit.
* New Year's Eve: my sister, a church service, a water/fire show and (the best part) a café. At midnight, I watched the fireworks alone and cried.
A difficult year is over.
Weary eyes, a desk lamp, a warm pool of light over scribbled notes and rebellious laptops.
A niche in a rock face overlooking the icy sea, battered by winds, rain or snow. Dark outside when I get up to work, dark again before I've finished.
Black jeans, silk shirt, December mood.
October rains, colours, turbulence.
I alternate between money trouble, breathing exercises, a class room, hypochondria, too much work, not enough work, panic, peace of mind.
There is not enough time to savour the blood-red-to-sunny-yellow maple leaves and the swooping, chattering jackdaws.