APRIL 2, 2022 – After slipping away from L’Abri, I took local trains to Zurich, then an overnight train north to Hamburg, and on to Copenhagen. From there I took the hydrofoil to Malmö, Sweden (the Øresund Bridge, connecting Denmark and Sweden, was 19 years in the future).
My landing in Sweden was a homecoming. On hand to greet me were my cousins Merith and her brother Mats-Åke. We’d become well acquainted on my inaugural visit to Sweden two years before and were the best of friends. Waiting at Merith’s apartment were her husband, Peter, and their infant daughter, Karin. We celebrated our reunion in proper fashion. I felt more at home in Sweden than . . . at home.
Days later, Merith and Karin and Mats and I drove to Bjellerhult, my cousins’ childhood home in rural, picturesque Småland, two hours to the northeast of Malmö. Their gracious mother still lived there, maintained the house, gardened, baked bread in the old-fashioned shed oven beyond the house, and from scratch (including boiled venison), prepared delectable meals fit for royalty. Merith and Mats’ older brother, Jan-Erik, and his family lived a few kilometers beyond and joined the feasting. Across the road stood the spacious farmhouse of my cousins’ grandfather, Alfred (my grandmother’s favorite brother), who’d died decades before. The place was now occupied by Alfred’s four bachelor-farmer sons. Jan-Erik, Mats and Merith’s father, the only son to venture far out into the world (he was a mariner), was the fifth son—among three sisters too.
In this idyllic setting we filled long summer daylight with leisurely bike trips down undulating, dirt lanes that took us deep into troll country and past enough bucolic scenery for an artist to fill a thousand canvases. We also drove to Husjönäs—the farmstead where generations of our family (including Alfred, my grandmother, and their siblings) had lived. There we visited more cousins.
Every evening back at Bjellerhult, Mats, Merith, and I stayed up late talking and laughing, playing the Stockholm version of Monopoly, and swapping travel stories—five years before, Mats had concluded a nine-month “conquest” of the Americas, and Merith had traveled widely, as well.
Eventually, I took a train from Älmhult to Stockholm to visit another cousin, Anders. He’d grown up outside the village of Ebbemåla in the province of Blekinge between the Baltic Sea and Småland’s southern border, not far from Bjellerhult. After long travels, including the “Conquest of the Americas” with Mats, Anders was now working on his doctorate in economics at the University of Stockholm. He accommodated me in his apartment near campus, and after his daily academic work, we regaled each other with travel stories—and discussed late into the night, the state of the world.
Two days later, I boarded a train for the far north of Sweden, then west to Narvik, Norway. The trip took 18 hours. In soaking rain I found my way to the well-managed youth hostel. Over a warm supper the pleasant staff helped me chart the course to my ultimate Norwegian objective—the Lofoten Islands.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
