One of my favourite Estonian foods is karask, a barley bread with sour milk.

It wasn’t a staple when I was a child, but my mum made it a few times. Now it’s come back as a commercial product – not in every supermarket, but some do sell it, as well as some artisanal bakeries and food market stalls.

For some reason I’ve never tried making my own, until very recently. I made a first batch a couple of weeks ago, and another one this weekend.

What made this one even better than a standard karask was the addition of quark to the batter. Barley is great, quark is great, the combination is even better.

These days quark is a health food: all low-fat or no-fat, marketed for its high protein content, homogenized into a smooth, creamy mass for easy consumption. Back when I was a child, Estonian quark was a solid, dense, rich product. The richer version was 12% fat, I believe, while the skinny kind was 6%. It was sold in paper-wrapped pats, kind of like you’d buy butter today.

I ran across old-school tvorog at the Baltic store. Sold in one-kilogram blocks, grainy and solid, just like it’s supposed to be. Not Estonian but Latvian, I believe (didn’t look to closely at the packaging) but still – what a find. Half of the one-kilo package immediately went into a double recipe of quark karask. The other half is in the freezer for when I bake another batch.

Served warm, with butter and – by suggestion of the recipe page – honey. I never had honey on my karask before but why not.

Sorting through a long-ignored pile of stuff in the living room, I discovered a box of CDs. Not just any CDs, but the ones that the kids used to listen to.

I find it harder and harder to refer to Ingrid and Adrian as “kids” but back then they truly were kids. Judging from the years printed on the covers, this would have been about 10 years ago. Not quite before Spotify, but at a time when Spotify hadn’t completely conquered the market and CDs were still a thing.

All the “Absolute Hits” and “Hits for Kidz” were in constant use in the car, together with a rotating selection of child-friendly hit CDs from the likes of Queen and ABBA. The “hits” CDs usually had a lot of songs from Melodifestivalen, the Swedish local equivalent to Eurovision Song Contest, but also such wonderful creations as Crazy Frog.

These days it’s all Spotify in the car, when we all listen to something together. Or individual headphones with whatever they all choose to listen to. But the “Hits for Kidz” are associated with so much nostalgia that we couldn’t just throw them out. Now they’re carefully packed away in the basement. Nobody will ever listen to them again, but maybe I’ll bring them out twenty years from now and show them off to my grandchildren. “Back when your mum/dad was your age, this is how you listened to music.”

We had a team lunch with the Sortera team today, and walked from the office to the restaurant, with nice views along the way.

During dinner, our project manager – very clearly the most “people person” among us – kept the conversation interesting by throwing out questions. One of them was: what major event in your life has affected it the most?

Lives are, of course, full of pivotal events that make it change course. Had I gone to a different university, things would be different. Had I not met Eric, had I taken a different job, had I not quit my finance job for software engineering, had I not moved here and there – all of these changes would have ensured that I end up in a different place.

However, with all of those counterfactuals I can still imagine what life might be like. But there is one event so pivotal that, had things gone differently, I cannot even realistically picture how my life would be, and that is moving to Sweden.

The move was not my decision – I was only fifteen at the time and it was more or less just decided for me. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, because I wasn’t thinking in such terms, but the move was traumatic. As a teenager – a sensitive time in life – all of a sudden leaving behind my father, all my friends, what little extended family we had, everything that was familiar. New town, new country, new language, new school system, new teenage culture, new everything. And that in an era without internet or email or video calls or even normal phone calls back to Estonia (because international phone calls were prohibitively expensive). I remember regularly collapsing on a bed and sleeping for a few hours after getting home from school in the afternoon, because it was mentally so exhausting.

I coped, and I managed, but that one change has surely coloured everything that I have done since. Without it, I imagine would have lived a much steadier life. It took many years for me to feel fully confident and comfortable in Sweden, to stop feeling like an outsider trying to fit in. Plus for years we only had temporary residence permits, to be renewed every year or two, so there was always the threat of potentially being uprooted all over again and having to start over. And there was nobody to lean on. I had friends at school, but they were all new and thus superficial relationships, and I didn’t feel that I had much in common with most of them. I was very alone. I don’t think I can even pick out all the ways that this fundamental lack of security and support has affected my choices later in life.

There’s no control group to compare to. Have the challenges made me stronger in the end? Or would I have grown more if I’d had stable ground to stand upon? Who knows.

The move did of course broaden my horizons. One move led to another, and another – I spent a term in Belgium as an exchange student, seven years working in London, and months New York. I’ve travelled more and experienced more than I would have done if I had remained in Estonia. I doubt that I’d have climbed the Kilimanjaro, or gone diving in the Red Sea, or seen Yo-Yo Ma live in concert.

One of the things we did together with my father today was look through some very old family photos, trying to figure out who was who. I got to hear some stories of my long-dead grandfather and great-grandparents. We drew a family tree for Ingrid and Adrian to keep all the names straight.

Here’s my great-grandfather Eduard, in St Petersburg, then Petrograd, with my grandfather Peeter (born 1911) and my great-aunt Aino (born 1913). Guessing from the children’s approximate ages, I’d say the photo is from 1914. Peeter died well before I was born, but I met Aino several times. I remember her as a large-boned old lady with a loud, happy laugh.

And this is my great-grandmother Gertrud Agathe, with Aino and Peeter again, and their younger siblings Paul and Ott. Ott died young in WW2. Paul emigrated to Canada at some point; I remember him sending gifts to us after the fall of the Iron Curtain. (Including my first jigsaw puzzles ever. Soviet Estonia did not have jigsaw puzzles. I had some home-made “mosaic” puzzles – that great-aunt Aino made and gifted to me, actually – but the jigsaw puzzles from Paul were an exotic treat.)

The boys all have the Toomik family protruding ears. I had the same; I remember having surgery to fix them when I was still in pre-school. Neither Ingrid nor Adrian has inherited them.

Sorting through all the paper that Adrian has produced during this school year. Archiving some for nostalgia; throwing out the rest.

Perhaps I’m more nostalgic and inclined to storing memories than most people. I like having the ability to go back and re-visit old memories, and not just in my head but with the support of pictures, words, and objects. I’ve saved a few baby clothes for both Ingrid and Adrian, and my favourite baby-wearing wraps, and material from my own years at high school and university.

I wish I had more from my own childhood. I’d have loved to show my school uniforms to the kids, because that’s just so different from how things work these days. Or my handwriting exercises, again because things are so different now. Fountain pens (not pencils), with a jar of ink on the desk, and exercise books with lines after lines of uniform, tidy copies of the letter “m”.

Twenty years from now, the idea of even having paper in school could be a quaint memory, so these might be fun to look at. Maybe Ingrid and Adrian won’t care when they’re all grown and have their own children. But maybe they will.

Bonus cat, because of course every flat surface is a cat bed.

The view from my tent was quite different today, with yesterday’s golden sunset replaced by a rainy night and morning. I woke up at six, nipped out for a quick pee, but before I could do anything more it started raining again, so I was forced to laze around in the tent for an hour. At seven there was a break in the rain so I could pack standing up (instead of curled up in the tent) and get on my way.

There were a few brief, light showers later, but most of the time was rain-free. I just got water from below. After a night of off-and-on rain, the forest was all wet, which was especially noticeable on the more overgrown sections of the trail. The undergrowth doesn’t even need to be tall, it just needs to be right next to the path to soak you. It felt like I wiped off and redistributed all the water on all the blueberry bushes in the whole forest. My trousers legs were absolutely dripping.

What can there be to photograph when I am walking the exact same route as yesterday, with nothing new? (Apart from the weather, that is.) What’s new is my eyes and my attention.

The first anthill of the day is nothing special. But when the day is over and I realize just how many they were, and how many stretches of the trail were so covered with ants that I couldn’t stop, I see those anthills with different eyes. They were truly many, and large, and frankly a bit annoying.

Stands of raspberries were also everywhere, and rather more pleasant than the anthills. Truly this section of the trail seems to get very few visitors, because the raspberry bushes were chock full of ripe raspberries, with nobody eating or picking them. I ate my fill, and then some – because how can I just pass such bounty without partaking? – and I barely made a dent. The first two kilometres or so (starting from the stage-19 end of the stage) were especially good raspberry picking grounds. If I ever want to drive an hour and a half and then walk another half-hour in order to get all-you-can-eat wild raspberries, then this is the place to be.

Some views just look better coming from the other direction. I know that as a photographer I should stop and turn around when I pass some interesting landscape feature, but I usually forget. But today I get another chance.

For the last hour of my hike, I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, and then not very distant at all. Ten minutes before I reached the car, the heavens opened. I was all ready for it, with my backpack rain cover in place and my rain jacket literally in my hand, so it didn’t actually bother me much. Apart from my trouser legs – which I had long since given up on – I was still mostly dry when I got there.

At that point it was absolutely pouring down, and the thunder was right over my head. Instead of trying to pack myself into the car in the downpour, I took shelter in an archway of the farm building behind which I had parked. It got wetter and wetter as time went by, until I had to make a little channel in the gravel to guide the water out at the other end of the archway, instead of letting it spread out sideways towards the walls.

It reminded me of playing in the mud when I was a child. Back then the street where I lived was surfaced with gravel, not asphalt, so it got a bit muddy when it rained. It also sloped slightly, so we got these lovely streams of water along the sides of the street. With a sturdy stick, we could drag new channels to make the streams join up or go the way we wanted. We had no fancy boats, but I remember sending small twigs rafting downstream.

Anyway, the sides of the archway remained dry, so I could sit down and have a leisurely lunch while I waited for the thunderstorm to abate. The good thing about summer rains is that there are usually breaks in them. I could get into the car all dry and nice. There was much more rain later while I was driving home, to the point where the rain hit the windscreen in splats rather than drops and I could barely see the car ahead of me, but I got home safely.

Apparently the snake toy that broke wasn’t my old one, because I just found mine in a box with old toys that I had meant to sort through (and am now in fact sorting through). Larger than Adrian’s, and larger than I had remembered. Somewhat yellowed, and a bit worn, but still in full working condition.

I also found our old box of old knock-off Estonian “Lego” bricks, which was the only kind available in Estonia back in the 1980s. It’s called “Think and build” – clearly branding wasn’t their foremost goal.

Much of the yarn I buy comes in hanks, so I’m often winding it into balls. Everybody on the internet says to buy a yarn winder and a yarn swift, but I really enjoy doing this by hand. It’s meditative. And the yarn feels nice. And it reminds me of my grandmother.

I remember holding up hanks of yarn for her to wind. I remember seeing her use a yarn swift in her home in town, but she probably didn’t bring it with her to her summer cottage, so I had to do its job when she was there. And she taught me how to hand-wind yarn into a soft, squishy ball, so it keeps its elasticity, by winding it over my fingers.

I loop my hank over an IKEA step stool instead of children’s hands.

I made grilled cottage cheese sandwiches for lunch. I guess a sandwich in English maybe needs to have two slices of bread, but for me the Nordic, open kind of sandwich is also a sandwich.

Ingrid and Adrian both tend to wrinkle their noses at these, while I love them. They both like other types of grilled sandwiches, especially with cheese – cheese and apple, cheese and tomato, cheese and pepper, banana and curry. But not with cottage cheese. “It’s like pizza bianca,” they say, as if that was a bad thing. (They do not like pizza bianca either.)

For me these sandwiches are childhood nostalgia food. To be really right, there should be dill in the topping, instead of the basil that I used today. If you want to make these at home: mix about 500 grams of cottage cheese with 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and chopped dill. Spoon generous amounts of the mixture onto buttered slices of toast and grill them until they look good. Don’t skimp; if there’s too little of the cheesy stuff, the result will be too dry.

There are other meals I remember from my childhood that I feel no desire to recreate. Milk noodle soup, for example, which is exactly what the name says – cooked noodles in milk. I remember eating this with gusto, but I don’t think I’d enjoy it now.

I had thought this was some Soviet-era invention but apparently it’s a traditional German recipe that’s existed for far longer than the Soviet Union. I stumbled upon a digitization of an Estonian cookbook from the beginning of the last century that has not just one but two recipes for milk soup with pasta, one using macaroni and one using noodles:

Piimasupp nuudlitega
3 toopi rõõska piima, tükike värsket võid, natukene soola
ja teelusika täis suhkrut keedetakse üles. Nüüd lisatakse sinna
juurde 1 nael katki murtud jõhv-nuudlid või 1 nael stern-nuud-
leid ja keedetakse kuni pehme on.

I want to thank everybody who sent us Christmas cards this year, even though I forgot.

One card stood out because of the envelope it arrived in – a Soviet-era envelope from 1987, with a New Year’s Eve celebratory design. Complete with boxes for filling in the postal code in a standard way, down at the bottom left. (The flap of the envelope has examples of all ten digits, so that the boxes get filled in correctly.) The boxes for postal code have existed for as long as I can remember, and clearly at least since 1987, so I guess they had OCR for sorting mail already back then?

There was officially no Christmas in Soviet Estonia, since Christmas and everything else with Christian roots was a despicable remnant of bourgeois mores and thus Not Done. We nevertheless celebrated Christmas in our home, on the quiet, and so did many other households.

Official midwinter celebrations were all for the New Year. Apart from the name and the date, it was very similar to Christmas, though… with decorated trees with baubles and lights, gingerbread cookies, and a bearded man bringing gifts. The bearded man was Ded Moroz, Father Frost, who was usually clothed in blue rather than red, and whose sled was pulled by three horses rather than a bunch of reindeer, but who otherwise functioned very much like Santa Claus. (TIL that even Ded Moroz was too bourgeois and was banned after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, but brought back a few decades later.)

In Estonian, Ded Moroz was not called Father Frost or külmataat, but näärivana, because he fused with not only Christmas but also the old Estonian New Year’s traditions, called näärid. Fun fact for you: näärid have their roots in Scandinavian traditions, and the word itself comes from the Swedish nyår, “new year”.