Sweden Cont'd II
Day 2, Thursday pm; Summer cabin:
After hours of driving, shopping in Swedish supermarkets
for food, going to Ida's cousins who didn't speak a lick
of English and staring at their kid for thirty minutes,
we arrived at the cabin. It was just as I expected it would
be.. only slightly more nautical than I had anticipated.
As Autumn was definitely in its beginning stages, the cabin
was freezing. We turned the radiators on, turned the outside
heating lamps on, and began making our way through,
lugging in suitcases, unpacking the food, and making
ourselves comfortable. For me, this involved changing from
my ballet flats and into my boots, grey hoodie, and pashmina
scarf and tying my hair back.
I opened the first of four bottles of wine, put on an Otis
Redding cd, and began chopping the vegetables for dinner.
Ida made her way throughout the place, and after a while
of having the heating on, various lights, the oven, and music
one of the fuses blew. Half of the cabin was lit, the other half was not.
I lit roughly a hundred tea light candles, and carried on with
dinner. Ida panicked about, trying to get things up and running.
There is no signal where we were, so she had to drive up
to the top of a hill to phone her mum to find out where the
spare fuses were. She came back after a while, and viola!
We had lights and heating again. I opted to leave the lights
off, for the most part. I found the ambience and atmosphere
to be exactly what that place needed. We sat down to eat,
talked, laughed, and sang along to Otis.
The rest of the night varied from the sofa, to the table and chairs
outside beneath the heating lights. We rotated my weird dog
mask, and laughed. We had long conversations about various things,
most of them being rather serious and enlightening.
Different from our usual drinking-chats. We stayed wrapped up
in blue fleece blankets for the most part, until finally making
our way to the bunk beds to sleep. I slept in my socks
because it was still so cold throughout the cabin. Everything
outside was pitch black - not a light in view, except for the
stars..which were beautiful.
