I've met a couple of times now with Axel's three brothers - Johan, Alfred and Tor - as well as Johan's son Vilgot and Alfred's partner, Cissi, and son, Igor. It is very lively having children running around. Vilgot is four years old and shy, but can be prompted to count to ten in English for me. Igor is an energetic baby of fifteen months that rockets around with gaping grin and bright eyes. Both babies and dogs are extensively wrapped up against the cold here. I wonder what they think about the weather when their parents/owners drag them out? I suspect their noses get cold? It's fun hanging out with the brothers - almost a picture of my own family but with the gender reversed. I like seeing the easiness of the interactions, the stretching comfortable silences and the self-referent jokes that need only be hinted at to send them into gales of laughter. We had the traditional Grimlund Bros meal, pasta carbonara (or "nara" for short), and they all had different ideas about the "proper" recipe. I hope me and my sisters will be so close and easy when we're all grown up.
We took a dinky blue train out to Lidingö, the Stockholm island suburb where Axel grew up, and where the Grimlund clan has grown up for generations. The whole neighbourhood is full of connections and relations and memories, so it felt very important to finally have seen it. Both the experience and the physical place reminded me of my visit to Grosse Pointe in Michigan, exploring my father's childhood haunts while the cold grey winter air evoked the appropriate sense of an abandoned youth preserved in ice. Or perhaps just a hibernating youth. When the seasons change all the children will come out again, running around under the leafy trees in the sunlight.
I went for a walk in Lidingö on my own, past the huge Swedish houses - cubes painted white and red or yellow. I found a forest and went in, hoping for squirrels, but the only sounds among the still trees was the squeak of my cotton stockings rubbing against each other. Exploring in the bare forest I quickly lost any sense of time, and almost of self. The still coldness, the unmoving world, the leaf mud, the sky darkening from grey to dark grey. I honestly don't know how long I was there - I walked past a massive firepit with log seats, a grove of silver birch around a small puddle-lake that reflected the branches like glass, the stone foundations and doorsteps of a family home ruined by fire in the 1930s, and came as though drawn out of the trees onto a stone pier against which the waves of a grey lake slapped harshly. The woods and water are so different from home, evergreen natives and pine and the blue blue Pacific. The nature here is older and colder, and the stones are polished. I felt, not quite "lost, unhappy and at home", but something of that sentiment.
It's funny how when you start to talk about people you end up talking about geography. A girl asked me, "I know Australia and New Zealand are geographically quite different, but are they culturally quite similar?" I said yes, we are quite similar, and yet the impact of geography on the respective cultures cannot be ignored. One could debate this point at length, but it is a roundabout way of saying that I also visited people in Lidingö. I met Axel's "farmor" (in English "fathermother" or paternal grandmother), Inger, a woman of strong character and enthusiasm and a famous name in Swedish journalism and cuisine. Among her many curious possessions was a cabinet full of phallic representations - the penis cupboard. She told me very seriously that each one was attached to a very special memory. Axel and I had dinner with Axel's father Bosse, and his wife Anna-Karin and her two granddaughters, in the house where Axel lived since he was eight (which is next door to Axel's first house). We ate tacos - another traditional Swedish dish.
It's been interesting, being part of a family of total strangers. But they're strangers I've had much pleasure in meeting.
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