Bilberries and lingonberries
The right to pick is one of the better ideas anyone has had. You may walk in the forest and gather berries and mushrooms more or less anywhere that is not somebody's yard, and in August a great many people do,…
Lakeside Notes
Short notes on slow seasons, cold water and small cabins. A few hundred words at a time, a few times a year, from a cabin by a lake in southern Finland.
White nights
At midsummer the sun goes down a little before eleven and is back by four, and in between it does not get dark so much as blue. You can read outside at midnight. Whether you can sleep is another matter; the…
The thaw
Spring here is mostly a matter of mud. The snow goes grey, then granular, then retreats to the north side of everything, and the track down to the shore turns into something you cross in rubber boots or not at…
Heating the sauna
A wood-fired sauna is not difficult, but it does not hurry. Ours takes a little over an hour from a cold stove in winter, and the hour is part of it. You split the kindling, carry two buckets from the hole in…
First ice
The lake froze properly on the ninth. For a week before that it had been making up its mind: a skin of ice in the morning, open water again by noon, the reeds along the shore wearing a rim of frost that never…