Old Sweden

This morning after my morning chores with the animals I went to a recreated old village with sod roof houses from the 12th century called Asle Ta. On the way there I passed a little roadside picnic table next to a cute little shed that was full of Swedish memorabilia. It’s obviously a spot where folks can stop and have a meal, set up at the top of somebody’s driveway. I love this! At Asle Ta I saw examples of houses dating back to the 1400s.I cannot get over how many people lived in these essentially one room houses. In one of the houses a family with seven children lived in one room with no furniture until almost all of the children had moved out. I’m guessing they didn’t have furniture because there would not have been anywhere to put it with so many people! It is not like Sweden is a tropical island where you could easily spend whole days outside for most of the year. I guess one upside is that homes would be warmer with so many bodies in them (though the lack of frequent bathing would lead to an interesting smell I am sure!) Anyway, it was absolutely fascinating learning a little bit about the lives of some of the people who had lived in these houses, some of them were occupied as recently as 1960! 

The people in the houses were often referred to by the name of the town they came from or some other designation rather than their given name. I have noticed that in the graveyards well over half, and in some graveyards, closer to 75% of the gravestones have last names that end with ‘sson’. I need to do a little more research on this, but from what I can tell  people would take their father‘s name and add  ‘sson’ after it and that would become their last name. So if your family named you Eric and your father‘s name was John your name would be Eric Johnsson. I suppose in small rural villages that probably made sense, though I’m thinking it would get confusing after a while if the villages grew large and many people had similar names. I did see on the information plaques that several people had changed their last names, so maybe that was another way to distinguish people. I need to find out more about how common that was. 

Next I visited a round church, which is one of only eight in Sweden. It was very plain inside compared to the one I saw yesterday but a similar set up with very thick walls,  wooden pews with doors and a beautiful altar. I stopped at another church that was also relatively plain, just down the road from it was a passage grave rising on a mound covered in wildflowers. They are quite striking sites these memorials created in the Stone Age. I also passed by some huge stone markers at the side of the road.

On my way back home, I stopped in at a  store in Falkoping that was closed when I was there last week. I wanted to check it out because the artist had wonderfully quirky drawings and paintings with great sayings mostly in Swedish but some in English. I downloaded an AI translation app the other day which has been really helpful, I just focus my camera on what I want translated, take a picture then it gives me the translation in English. I used the app to figure out what she had written on a lot of her drawings. When I went up to buy the items that I picked out Margaretha, the artist, asked me where I was from. When I told her San Francisco, she was thrilled and wanted to know if I was here on vacation and I explained to her about my volunteering and that part of the reason I come was because of my great grandparents who are from Sweden. She was so excited, she said she’s often had Germans and other Europeans stop by the store, but I was her first American! She told me about a Swedish program that had brought several Americans over who had Swedish roots and helped them find where their families were originally from. We had a lovely conversation and ended up taking some photos together. In fact, I will probably be showing up on her Instagram account soon! She only took cash or Swish, a payment app in Sweden, so I was only able to buy some postcards as I didn’t have much cash on me. I am planning to go back again over the weekend to get a few more items as I really love her drawings. One in particular really called to me, it was of five old women in their bathing suits and swim caps – the joy on their face6 is just fantastic. When I mentioned that I had 4 sisters and I was buying copies of the postcard for them she told me the story behind it. She and her husband used to live on the West Coast of Sweden near the beach and at that particular beach there are a group of older women who would spend the whole day at the beach going in the water, sitting in the sun, drinking a coffee and just thoroughly enjoying themselves. So she decided to paint them, and I am so glad she did. I absolutely love depictions of older women in love with life. I also love how she wrapped up my bag of purchases and added a ribbon and made it like a little carry bag. Very cute!

I got home and made myself some lunch. I don’t really like the ‘everyday’ Swedish cheese, I find it pretty bland, but I’ve discovered putting it in a quesadilla with chopped onion and arugula works really well, so I had that along with salad from the garden and an orange for my lunch. My work for the day was to clean the flat upstairs as there will be renters coming in tomorrow. I finished that just in time for a thunderstorm to start! 

Pia had told me that Donnie gets very scared of thunderstorms and she wasn’t sure how Pomona would do as she had not been with her the last time there was a thunderstorm. I was just coming in the back door when a large roll of thunder came, and I could hear Donnie panting. I went and sat next to him and just petted him and spoke calmly. Pomona came up to me and hid her nose in the side of my leg. The cats were completely unconcerned, of course! So we hung out on the floor for about 45 minutes as the storm passed. The rain just bucketed down for a while. I haven’t seen rain like that since I was in Canada. We ended up having on and off thunderstorms for several hours, but once they were done and the skies started to clear it was a gorgeous sunset.