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”.

I didn’t take a proper photo today, but I did photograph a cake recipe – the strawberry and elderflower one we’ve had for Midsummer a few times – to send it to my mum, in return for the redcurrant cake recipe. So I guess I could share those with you.

Redcurrant cake

Crust

• 125 g butter
• 75 g sugar
• 2-3 egg yolks
• 250 g flour
• ½ tsp baking powder
• 2-3 tbsp breadcrumbs

Filling

• 4 egg whites
• 200 g sugar
• 75-100 g hazelnuts
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• 500 g redcurrants

Cream butter with sugar. Add egg yolks one by one while stirring. Mix baking powder and flour and add to the butter mixture. Roll the dough into a ball, cover and cool for 50-60 minutes. Line a springform pan with the dough, leave a 5 cm edge. Sprinkle the bottom with breadcrumbs.

Whisk the egg whites. Gradually add sugar. Whisk for another few minutes. Add chopped hazelnuts and cinnamon.

Stir the redcurrants into two thirds of the egg mixture. Pour the filling in the crust. Cover with the rest of the egg mixture (either piping or simply spreading).

Bake at medium heat for about 1 hour. (We interpreted “medium heat” as around 175°C.)

The original Estonian recipe had margarine instead of butter but nobody misses that.

The also recipe called for “nuts” rather than specifying hazelnuts. Back then everybody understood that that’s what you mean when you say “nuts”. Locally grown nuts were simply nuts; exotic, fancy nuts had longer, fancier names. That may still be the case actually.

Money wasn’t something we discussed in our family when I was a child. Still, I believe that during my first fifteen years, our purchasing decisions were limited not so much by lack of money but by lack of things to buy. Soviet planning, defitsiit, the usual story.

After I moved to Sweden to join my mother, we were poor. One adult and two teenagers living on the income of a single doctoral student, plus whatever welfare benefits we got. We always bought the cheapest variety of everything: those horrible artificial-looking apples, and whatever groceries were on sale. I remember a carton of orange juice that my mother bought because it was the cheapest, that tasted so bad that I refused to drink it. But we didn’t buy a different one until someone had drunk it.

Luckily I got a job within less than a year – illegally, for cash in an envelope at the end of the week. Other teenagers get an allowance; I worked to help pay the rent, and whatever I wanted or needed to buy for myself. The job was at a sporting goods shop and I got an employee discount even though I wasn’t formally employed, so I got good deals on cheap winter jackets and such. I still have one backpack that I bought there.

I could never afford going to the movies. I think I may have gone once during my four years of high school.

Buying books was a luxury. I remember the feeling of saving up for a single paperback, and then the difficulty of choosing just one.

I know my grandmother was poor in her retirement. I saw her always considering the prices of groceries oh so carefully, and wondering whether she could afford to repair her shoes.

I have no rational reason to expect my own retirement to be like that. I have a well-paid job and I live well below my means and I have significant savings. But underneath the surface there is still that small fear that I might end up there, like she was, like I was. Old and poor.

In Soviet Estonia, you didn’t go to the supermarket and come home with fresh fruit and berries. You could buy fruit and berries in the market, when they were in season. But mostly you got them in your grandmother’s garden. Everybody had grandmothers, and all grandmothers had gardens with fruit trees and berry bushes. Because even in Soviet Estonia people wanted fruit, and that was about the only way to get any.

Fresh fruit doesn’t keep all year, so most of it was preserved as jams and squashes, or in syrup.

Jam was for everyday use. On bread, porridge and pancakes; stirred into water to make a drink; in crumbles and cakes. Fruit in syrup was dessert. Raspberries in syrup (vaarikakompott) were my favourite.

During berry season, I think my mother and grandmother were nearly always either picking fruit, cleaning fruit, or cooking it into jam. There were often jam jars cooling in the kitchen of grandma’s cottage.

Most of my childhood’s jams were made of fruits that Swedes know about, even if they don’t grow them much. Quince jam is an exception; I don’t think most people here know that quinces exist or that the fruit are edible. Aronia berries are another oddity. They’re tart and astringent when raw, just like quinces, and sloe for that matter. But they make a great squash, and aronia and apple jam is lovely.

Jam was stored in glass jars. There were no preservatives available (apart from sugar) so it was important to thoroughly sterilize the jars and lids, and then close them so they were airtight.

The simplest kind of lids were made of blue rubber. I’m no expert but I don’t think those were very good.

There were glass lids that had to be fastened with a special kind of clamp. You put the clamp across the lid, and then you twisted the clamp so that its ends gripped the lid to the jar. There were ridges on the lid that pushed the clamp tighter the more you twisted it.

Later a third, fancier kind of lid became available – single-use metal lids. A special tool was used to tighten those. This kind of lid is still used, apparently. I’ve never seen them in Sweden, but googling in Estonian brought up stores that sell them.

I have no photos of any of these things. But I found this photo of raspberries in syrup, made in Estonia, with the right kind of lids on the jars. Click to visit the original Estonian blog post.

These days, in Sweden, the first day of school is nothing special. Admittedly they do teambuilding activities instead of ordinary lessons, and there’s paperwork, and going through the schedule and such. But it feels mundane and administrative.

The fact that it happens on some random Wednesday in the middle of August doesn’t help. In Estonia, the school year always starts on the 1st of September. That date is almost as much of an institution as Christmas Eve. You say “1st of September” and everybody knows what you’re talking about.

The first day of school was special and festive. I remember dressing up for it. Even the parents taking their children to school dressed up.

We wore a school uniform. These were later abolished, but I wore a uniform up to grade four or five. In the lower grades, girls wore a knee-length dark blue pinafore dress over a lighter blue shirt. On festive occasions, the blue shirt was replaced by a white one with ruffles.

The first day of school started with a ceremony in the school’s assembly hall. There were speeches of welcome by the principal, performances by the school choirs, etc. After that each class split off to their own classroom and the day probably shifted into a more mundane and administrative mode like today.

Here’s a photo of me on the first day of 2nd grade. Wooden clogs were cool back then.

Praegusel ajal siin Rootsis on esimene koolipäev üsna tavaline. Õppetundide asemel on küll muud tegemised, nagu üksteisega taas sõbraks saamine, mitmesugune paberiasjandus, tunniplaani läbivõtmine jne. Aga üldiselt igapäevane ja administratiivne.

Ei aita seda sündmust erilisemaks teha ka see, et kool algab suvalisel kolmapäeval keset augustikuud. Eestis algab kool alati esimesel septembril. See kuupäev on sama tuntud kui jõuluõhtu. Räägid esimesest septembrist ja kõik teavad, millest jutt käib.

Esimene koolipäev oli eriline ja pidulik. Mäletan, kuidas selleks puhuks pidulikud riided selga pandi. Isegi lapsevanemad, kes lapsed kooli tõid, riietusid pidulikult.

Koolis kanti koolivormi. Hiljem kaotati see ära, aga mina kandsin koolivormi vist neljanda või viienda klassini. Algklassides kandsid tüdrukud tumesinist pihikseelikut ja heledamat sinist pluusi. Pidupäevadel asendas sinist pluusi valge, volangikestega.

Esimene koolipäev algas aktusega kooli aulas. Kooli direktor pidas tervituskõne, esinesid kooli koorid, jne. Pärast seda läksid klassid laiali oma klassiruumidesse ja eks siis vist järgnesid igapäevasem paberimajandus nagu tänapäevalgi.

Pilt on minu esimesest koolipäevast teises klassis. Puukingad olid tol ajal popid.

I’ve been a voracious reader for as long as I can remember. We had a great variety of books at home. I read children’s books at first of course, but moved on to adult literature around my tweens. Classics, detective stories, travel stories, adventure stories, and so on. (Everything except contemporary English-language literature, which was hard to get hold of until the early nineties.)

At my grandmother’s cottage where we spent our summers, there wasn’t much to read. Partly due to a lack of space, I imagine. The cottage consisted of a single large room, with the kitchen open into that same room. 35 m² maybe? – and that housed as many as five of us at times. Or maybe the expectation was that we’d all be outdoors most of the time.

We took the train to town, to Tallinn, at regular intervals for laundry, baths, groceries and whatever else the adults did. My grandma’s apartment there was not much larger, but it did have a bookcase… which, however, contained almost no books that I recognized or that looked interesting. There was really a surprisingly small overlap between her library and my parents!

There were two or three (quite literally) children’s books from my father’s childhood in the 1950s. One was a picture book about how trucks were produced in the 1950s. One was about how spacecraft worked. I read both.

I read and browsed books about cooking and gardening, including giant gardening encyclopedias in German, which had gratifying amounts of illustrations. I’ve always liked well-written, illustrated “how-to” books.

I opened dull-looking books at random and stumbled upon a collection Tolstoy’s stories for children (in that same 14-volume series from the 1950s) and read most of those.

There was one small oasis in that reading desert – two books that I truly enjoyed and kept returning to. I think we may even have taken them with us to that tiny cottage. Both were memoirs. One was Kirurgi süda by Fyodor Uglov, a pioneering Russian doctor and surgeon. (“Heart of a surgeon”, full of fascinating medical case histories, not available in English as far as I can see.) The other was Eesriie avaneb (“The curtain opens”) by Mari Möldre, an Estonian actress.

My grandma passed away in 2003. Now I have her copies of these books in my bookshelf, and they always remind me of her.

Olen lapsest saati ablas lugeja olnud. Meie kodus oli lai valik raamatuid. Alustasin loomulikult lasteraamatutega, aga varases teismeeas läksin täiskasvanute kirjandusele üle. Klassika, krimkad, reisikirjeldused, seikluslood, jne. (Kõike pealse kaasaegse inglisekeelse kirjanduse, mida polnud saada enne 1990-ndaid aastaid.)

Minu vanaema suvilas, kus me oma suved veetsime, polnud eriti midagi lugeda. Osaliselt vist ruumipuuduse tõttu, oletan ma. Suvilas oli üksainuke suur tuba, ja köök avanes samasse tuppa. 35 m² võib-olla? – ja seal elasime kuni viiekesi. Või oli arvestatud sellega, et kõik veedavad suurema osa ajast õues.

Sõitsime aeg-ajalt rongiga Tallinna pesu pesema, vannis käima, sisseoste tegema ja mida muud täiskasvanud veel tegid. Mu vanaema linnakorter polnud suvilast palju suurem, aga seal oli raamatukapp… mis küll ei sisaldanud peaaegu ühtegi raamatut mida ma oleks ära tundnud, või mis huvitav näiks. Tema raamaturiiuli sisu ja meie pere oma vahel oli üllatavalt vähe ühist!

Seal oli kaks või kolm lasteraamatut minu isa lapsepõlvest 1950-ndatel aastatel. Üks oli pildiraamat sellest, kuidas 1950-ndatel veoautosid toodeti. Üks oli sellest, kuidas kosmoseraketid töötavad. Lugesin mõlemat.

Lugesin ja lappasin raamatuid kokandusest ja aiandusest, muuhulgas hiiglasuuri saksakeelseid aianduse entsüklopeediad, milles palju illustratsioone oli. Hästi kirjutatud, paljude piltidega käsiraamatud on mulle alati meeldinud.

Avasin suvalisi igava välimusega raamatuid ja leidsin sedaviisi Tolstoi lood lastele (osa tollest samast 14-köitelises sarjast) ja lugesin suurema osa läbi.

Selles raamatukõrbes oli üks väike oaas – kaks raamatut, mida ma ikka ja jälle tõelise rõõmuga lugesin. Vist võtsime nad isegi kaasa sinna pisikesse suvilasse. Mõlemad olid mälestused. Üks oli kuulsa vene arsti ja kirurgi Fjodor Uglovi „Kirurgi süda“, täis põnevaid haigusjuhtumite kirjeldusi. Teine oli näitlejanna Mari Möldre „Eesriie avaneb“.

Mu vanaema suri 2003. aastal. Nüüd on need tema raamatud minu riiulis, ja nad meenutavad mulle alati teda.