Tag: Countryside Page 1 of 4

Life after life

On July 8, 2023

My strawberries

Amongst my parent’s generation, there were a few men who, though they had reached the age when they could retire, they didn’t. Their wives had retired already, if they had worked, but not these few men. Their workplace was still willing to have them even though they might have passed their best before date. I assume they must have liked their jobs enough to keep working even when they didn’t need to. My parents retired as soon as they were old enough to do so, leaving behind them jobs that were just jobs and looked forward to doing something that they really wanted to do. But my parent’s friend continued working and kept on traveling to his job every day. If you asked him why he continued to take the hour and a half bus ride in to the city from the retirement community he had recently moved to, leaving behind wife and new friends, he would stare at you with a look on his face of incomprehension. Finally, he said, in a very quiet tone of voice, “If I retire, I am afraid that I will die.” He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He was serious. He was sure that if he should stop working, the next day or week or month after his retirement party, he would die…of something. He eventually did retire. He and his wife got to spend more time with their kids and grandchildren. They traveled a bit together. They spent time at the clubhouse of their retirement community. And eventually in the fullness of time, his wife died and soon after so did he.

I have worked since I was about 17 – nothing serious until I was about 25, when I got my first job in the field that I had studied in college. Since then I have managed to support myself as an Art Director, Illustrator, Production manager, Board artist, Speaker support slide maker, Website designer, Powerpoint designer, magazine designer and in general, whatever one can do in the commercial art field. I have never needed the typing skills my mother insisted I acquire to help put food on my table – which is a good thing since my typing skills are really not all that much to write home about.

But all that professional working life is now 7 years behind me…and I am definitely retired. Am I dead yet?

I am not completely without things to do. I have 2 pro bono clients for whom I volunteer my skills and knowledge. I basically work for free now. But I get a pension, so I’m OK.

One of these groups, a Writers Festival, thinks I’m great. They love what I do for them. They are fun to work with. The project is something I am also interested in. I feel like I am doing a good job for them. But that little nagging voice that always lives in the back of my head says, “Of course they like you. You are free.” But the important thing is mostly they listen to my suggestions and often do what I suggest. That satisfies my control freak tendencies. So I’m OK.

The other group is a Jewish group working to bring Reform Judaism to Stockholm. It is a group that I have been involved with since before I retired – almost 2 decades, actually – a long time. I feel I know most of those people well. We have been on on the same board of directors together for so long that many of them have become friends. There are a lot of tasks on that board that I can not do. No one in their right mind would ask me to take the meeting minutes – the mishmash of swenglish would be illegible. Neither would I be useful to do anything in regards to religious tasks for my knowledge of such things is extremely superficial, a la carte and personal. To be the contact with the greater Jewish community is also something I would not be well suited to due to my poor comprehension of how Swedish society works and my latent phone fear. My only real usefulness lies in my years of work experience as a graphic designer. So that is what I have been on the board – a graphic designer. I designed their logo, I designed the now very out of date website and made a new one in WordPress. I make whatever graphics they need for promoting the group. And I try to maintain the look of the brand. These are things I know how to do. These are things I have experience in doing. With this group I feel like I am doing something important. So I’m OK.

Unlike my parent’s friend, my concern about my post-working life – and my fear – is metaphorical. I am still walking around. I am still breathing. I am not worried – at least not too much, that I will imminently drop dead any minute now. But…am I still alive? Do I still have worth? Does what I know have any value? And why aren’t people doing what I tell them?

In the summers, I have been spending most of my time at our country house with my husband. We have filled our planters with topsoil and I have bought plants to grow there. There are 3 requirements I insist on for any plants I might bring home: The plant has to be an almost indestructible perennial and need very little care from me, the plant has to have flowers, and finally if it has a wonderful scent that’s great. I have planted two small lilac bushes, 3 mock orange bushes, a flowering bush called Ölandstok in Swedish and two strawberry plants. I also planted 3 clematis plants to climb up the wall behind the planters. So far none of my plants have died yet and this year one of the lilac bushes had wonderful, scented flowers and my strawberry plant had strawberries. I spend a lot of time looking at these plants. This seems to be my new thing-to-do. It seems to pacify my anxiety about what I am doing with my post-work life. For the moment at least.

I guess with my two pro bono “jobs” and my green, planted friends, I have found my life after my life. I hope, as I work to keep all of these things alive, they will also keep me alive.

A new season

By Hilarie

On November 14, 2021

In Family, Life, Pratt, Stavsnäs

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven*

Celebrating 70 with princesstårta

This summer, on the 29th of June, l shared a Princesstårta with a few friends at our country house, thus observing and commemorating the last day of my seventh decade and officially turning 70. Four days later, I celebrated beginning a new season and the start of my eighth decade, together with a much larger group of friends at a big party at our summer house.

OK… so I am now 70 years old. There is no new age box for when you reach 70. The highest seems to be simply 65+ as if over 65 is just one big blur. What does that mean?

Originally, I hadn’t planned on doing anything special to mark my seventieth birthday. All I really wanted to do was hide and pretend it wasn’t happening and just go on from there. But I got talked into celebrating by my long-time friend and summer neighbor, Barbara Eveaus. She insisted I had to have a party and it would be a breeze because she would take care of planning everything for the party. LOL…you can not say that to a control freak like me. I am compelled to take care of that kind of thing. So… I gathered the long list of email addresses, I designed the invitation, I composed the overly wordy email message that sounded just like me, and then…I pressed send.

Empty Nester

By Hilarie

On January 9, 2021

In Uncategorized

This summer like every summer, we had a bird family move into the small, wooden, video-monitored birdhouse on our property. Small birds, like the Swedish talgoxe or the blåmes seem to like raising their families there. The video camera mounted inside this tiny home is connected by a long cable which hangs along various tree branches as it makes its way past our porch door to our wall mounted flat-screen TV and for about 5 weeks we can watch our little feathered family lay and hatch their eggs and raise their babies. We keep the TV turned on and its like having a moving Harry Potter-style black and white painting hanging on our living room wall.

In spring almost two years ago, my son bought his own apartment here in Stockholm. He and I had spent the fall and winter months looking at apartment listings and every Sunday we made our way to 3 different showings. He put offers on a few of the apartments but he knew his top limit of how much he could afford to spend and while he came close a few times, someone else always offered more. Until the last one, when his offer was accepted. I helped him to paint all the rooms. We spent a day at IKEA looking at and testing out furniture possibilities which he then ordered online and had delivered directly to his second floor apartment. We spent another week putting the furniture pieces together. By then, it was finally summer and his dad and I moved out to our summer house. Our son was busy at work in the city and just continued to live in our apartment. Time passed as it usually does – all too quickly. Fall and then winter and once again spring. In the meantime, his fully furnished apartment sat there, collecting dust while my son continued to live in the only home he has known, our apartment. People who knew he had bought an apartment would ask me how he liked living in his new place and I had to keep answering, “He hasn’t moved out yet.”

It became a running joke every time I met a friend… ‘Has he moved yet?’ they would ask. We just laughed.

Bird life

By Hilarie

On June 6, 2020

In Uncategorized

I was digging a hole in the garden dirt when I heard the terrified screeching. I couldn’t tell what was making the noise but it was coming from almost in front of me, from under the deck. The slatted doors leading there were open. I walked over to them and looked in.

It was dark, with thin streams of light falling on the assorted rubble strewn around. A few feet in front of me, sitting primly with her front paws close together was Coco – her soft brown mottled fur the perfect camouflage. She was watching me. She looked guilty. The gentle sound of fluttering coming from the bicycle parked to my right caused us both to turn our heads at the same time. By this time my eyes had gotten used to the dim light and I could see that a small brown bird had gotten its leg caught in the grid of the wire basket hanging from the handlebars. It was hanging upside down and occasionally tried to release itself by flapping its wings. As I stood watching, Coco walked over to the bird and gave it a gentle push with her paw. The bird started screeching and flapping its wings in her face and she backed off. I shooed Coco away and reached for the bird, gently extracting its leg from the basket. I saw that it was injured, with a superficial wound along its back down near its tail. It flapped wildly and afraid that I might crush it, I let it fall the 8 inches to the ground. It hopped madly to a protected cubbyhole among a pile of decaying plasterboard. Coco’s eyes remained glued to the little bird. Hunched over and squatting down, I made my way over to the bird and picked it up, making sure this time I had my hand firmly around its body and wings. It screeched and then lay quiet in my hand. I worked my way out from under the deck with Coco close behind.

But what was I going to do with this little bird? It wasn’t anything special. Just a little brown bird with dark speckles along its feathers. It seemed full-grown. And it was wounded. I didn’t have the knowledge to be able to tell if it could survive. I knew that I had already decided I was not going to bring it to a vet. I also knew I didn’t want Coco to kill it.

We have a small wooden birdhouse screwed on to the trunk of a pine tree on our country house property. It isn’t painted or pretty. But it has one very special attribute; it has a video camera inside it that is connected by a very long cable to the TV in our house. Every spring we watch as a pair of small birds, either blåmes or talgoxe, feather their nest inside, lay their eggs and hatch tiny baby birds. We watch as Mr and Mrs bird take turns sitting on the eggs and feeding the gaping mouths that hatch. We can even hear their peeps on the TV as mom and dad feed them. We call it Bird TV and we like to keep the TV on during the day so we can watch the action as we go about our own business. But this year there was a calamity in our bird house. Mom and Dad bird had hatched 9 hungry little babies this year. We watched as they energetically took turns bringing food to their tiny offspring. Towards the evening one of the parents would settle itself down for the night – first poking all the little bodies deep into the nest then spreading itself over the babies, and with a final flutter tuck its head under its wing to go to sleep. After about a week of daily bird life, we didn’t turn on the TV for a few days – it tends to get a bit repetitive – and just let them get on with their lives. When we finally checked in with our tenants, there seemed to be no movement in the nest. It was still too soon for any of the babies to have grown feathers and flown away. At first we thought the camera feed had crashed and froze. But we could see small bits of grass and feather down moving in the air. The camera was still live but no baby birds were. What had happened? We could just barely make out in the black and white image the shape of a few baby birds’ unmoving open mouths. Had the nest been attached by some predator? We looked out at the bird house and could see no mom and dad trying to get in. Had they died for some reason or been killed by something? There was no way for us to know.

We turned off the TV. We haven’t looked at Bird TV since.

I carried my rescued bird to the back of the house where there are trees and places she might be safer – out of reach of Coco – trying to figure out where to put her. I had decided in my mind that my little brown bird was a her. She was calm in my hand. I could feel her rapid heart beat rock her body through my gardening glove. Coco followed me – silent and slow – but not close. I couldn’t put my bird among the leftover planks of wood piled under this side of the deck – too open and easy for a cat to get at. What about in my son’s abandoned koja, his airy tree house built 4 feet off the ground? The roof was decaying but the half-walls were still sound, the floor strewn deep with undisturbed yellowed leaves from many summers past. It had a door that still closed. Coco couldn’t get in but would the bird be able to fly away when it felt a bit better? I loosened my hand. Where was Coco? I couldn’t see her nearby. My bird flapped her wings and flew 3 feet away, to land near the tumble of old metal supports left over from building our deck. They were piled on top of a half rotted wooden pallet lying close to the ground. She quickly scurried underneath. I saw Coco come out of the shadows and walk over to the pile but there was no way she could get underneath. My bird would be safe there.

But for how long? To live or to die? Like the nestlings in our bird house, I would never know what happened.