life in a finnish summer cottage

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Day three and four
Saturday and Sunday July 23rd and 24th, 2011
near Jyvaskyla

Family gathering. Almost all of my Mother’s 11 Sisters and Brothers, Their spouses and some of my cousins arrived for lunch. They made me feel very welcome and it was a beautiful if very noisy gathering. The sun was shining, the weather warm and food plentiful and good. I was able to meet and talk with all of the family who arrived, and everyone invited me to visit. It’s something we will attempt to do in the next week. There’s a lot of coffee drinking in my future – I can tell.

Sunday .
A day to rest.
The morning came, drizzly and cool, Only two laps of the lake before running to the cabin for warmth. The waking times are getting better, I managed a sleep in to 5.30am this morning. The morning was spent indoors in the warm with some silk wool and a crochet hook, talking and watching telly. The clouds faded by lunchtime, leaving the temperature cooler than the previous few days.
In the afternoon I sat in the sunshine, enjoying the peace and serenity. How’s the serenity?
Just for my work colleagues, I’ll describe the plumbing here at the summer cottage. There isn’t any. There is a very picturesque out-door dunny which looks a little like a children’s cubby house, and while having a sit, there’s a wonderful scene to contemplate outside the window.
In these types of cottages which aren’t inhabited through the year, any plumbing would freeze and possibly burst during the long cold winter, so most of them don’t have plumbing for water or waste. The water we use is pumped from the lake in a hose, the outlet attached to a tree. Washing water is also carried up in buckets, and drinking water is fetched from a nearby town from a natural spring. It’s all very close to nature, with the modern world feeling like it’s very far away.

About 6 we went off to check whether the raspberries are ripe. The trek took us on a tiny forest path, which would have left me totally lost in the wilderness if it wasn’t for my Aunt who miraculously found our way, even though at several points the trail disappeared totally, and we had to blaze our own. A path conjures for me a clearly defined trail, where several people can walk abreast on a relatively even ground. This wasn’t that type of path. It was a single footstep wide impression along the ground, winding it’s way between trees, around and occasionally over boulders, obscured by berry branches and bushes, however more or less discernible as a pathway which people have regularly followed (single file) over the years. The plant-life was varied, and lush, with ripe blueberries, cranberries which will be ready in September, raspberries in the clearings, ready to be plucked form the branches and eaten, of which I availed myself with relish. Mushrooms of various types, many edible, fir trees, birches and many I can’t name. We also passed by several ant hills nearly as tall as a man, built of pine-needles and bits of twig into an impressive mound by the industrious inhabitants.

Once again we went for a sauna. The sauna is an important part of Finnish life, and most homes and even apartment complexes have a sauna. The sauna is a wood lined small room, with tiers of wooden benches to one side, and a stove, electric or wood burning, with stones on top which become very hot. The room is usually heated to between 60 and 100 degrees Celsius and water is thrown onto the stones to create steam. The object of the exercise is to get up a good sweat, which is then rinsed off by going for a swim in a cool lake or river. A cold shower will suffice if there is no lake handy. The Finns are known for being so keen on this that in winter when the lakes are frozen over, they will make a hole in the ice to jump into the near freezing water.

I won’t be doing that.

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Photos

ripe raspberries
before I ate them