Julie\'s Nordic Island

Midsummer's tree

It’s Midsummer’s day and the birch branches are hanging limp from the docks after the evening’s festivities. Without any need to place seven wild flowers under my pillow (by doing so, you will dream of your future partner, according to the lore), I stuffed mine into the birch bound to the pretty white fence around the dock.

The birch is dominant everywhere at the moment. It hangs low over the shorelines and paths. Its comforting smell emanates from the forest, and it surpasses all other plants in its hunt for nutrients in whatever soil there is on this sandy, rocky island. In the bay it grows out of a styrofoam buoy that it has found some nutrient in. It thrives on bird island – a wooden raft anchored off our shores -  where something it can live off has accumulated.

A tractor pulls a hay wagon full of excited children down to the grounds where the Midsummer festival will be celebrated. It is decorated with none other than the birch branches. At the nearby church, birch adorns the entrance where the bride and the groom soon will enter. In the saunas being prepared for sweating away the schnapps that has washed down the sill and new potatoes, birch whisks soak in water, lending their irresistible aroma.

In the advanced societies of the world it has often become the practice that the decor or food of the festival is exotic – difficult to get a hold of locally and therefore a sign of status. Perhaps that is the reason I find the flaunting of the birch at a time of year when the birch is everywhere to be so refreshing. It is the legacy of peasant history, when affording the exotic was out of the question.  Yet this taking of what one has is something that we have a need to come back to today and into the future. We seem to have forgotten the proverbial art of making a bouquet out of the dandelions, as opposed to looking beyond the horizon to strain the earth for what we do not have.

In this way I find the birch on the dock to be very contemporary. It’s about making best use of what we’ve got. Out in their summer cottages, Swedes strive to become peasants during the summer. I used to laugh about this seemingly peculiar habit, but this peasant isn’t laughing any more. Rather, she can be found binding the birch branches to the dock on Midsummer’s Eve.

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For further information about “Rose in the Sand,” Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning book about a decade lived on a Swedish island, please visit www.julielindahl.com.

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