Midsummer

While all Sweden is one big hangover after the excessive drinking on Midsummer Eve yesterday (that's if you go after Swedish newspapers and Swedish Facebook friends' updates), Staffan and I have just started, with herring, new potatoes and a schnapps for lunch. We should have invited some friends. It's weird not to celebrate Midsummer with huge crowds.

Many years ago, my great-aunt was visiting us in Sweden around Midsummer, and I took her to the nearest celebration site to give her a sense of a genuine Swedish Midsummer. We brought picnic and sat in a hge ring with dozens of other families, watching the maypole being raised, the fiddlers play, the professional and amateur dancers dance, everybody sing. But my aunt was most impressed by a middle-aged man next to us. He was on his own. He had a low folding table with a nice table-cloth, a real plate, knife and fork, and a little glass. He had his picnic and his bottle. He poured himself a drink, chased it with herring and potatoes. He had no one to share the feast with, but he didn't want to be left behind.

Out of sync

It is a holiday in Sweden today. Midsummer. All our friends are in the country or in the archipelago. Here, it has been an ordinary, quite busy working day. I remember this from San Diego. It is amazing how quckly you forget the old calendar.

Will I miss it?

I allow myself a deviation from my otherwise strict chronology and move forward to here and now, Midsummer Eve. It is perhaps one of the most Swedish annual festivities, which like Christmas Eve and Easter are preferably spent with the family, although young people continue with their friends afterwards. My husband and I were invited to some friends on the West coast of Sweden where we had been before and would be glad to go to again, when we suddenly realized that this may be the last time ever in our house, the house where our children grew up, where we have lived twenty seven happy years. I am usually not too sentimental; in fact we frequently flee from Christmas to some warm and sunny country, but this time I felt I must stay at home. We have managed to gather 60% of the children and four out of nine grandchildren – the rest had already made other plans. We had luck with weather, as it started raining just as were about to break up. We sat outside, ate pickled herring with new potatoes, sour cream and chives, as is the Swedish habit for this occasion, followed by barbeque, strawberries and rhubarb pie. It was as usual noisy and chaotic, people talking all at once, plates and glasses in and out of the kitchen, mosquito bites, scratches, until half of the company fell asleep here and there about the house.

Now the house is empty and silent. I am exhausted. Silence rings in my ears.

Will I miss it next year? Will I come back to celebrate Midsummer with the family? Will I long for pickled herring? Or will it just be bygone time, something to look back at, but not regret?