I was born and raised in Finland, in a town called Oulu, about 160 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Yes, I know. That is pretty far up in the North, but don’t worry, we have TVs, microwave ovens, and automobiles. There are no polar bears, nor reindeer running around. At least not in Oulu.
My family’s summer cabin is located directly at the Arctic Circle. Close to the town of Rovaniemi, where Santa has his village. At our summer cabin, you can always see reindeer. This place holds some of the fondest memories of my childhood. The memories of long, long summers. Playing with the cousins, swimming in the lake, burning logs in the firepits by the lake, and tossing raw potatoes to cook in the flames while the parents were attending to their chores. Sometimes, we would find charred potatoes from the ashes the next day, and those were the ones that tasted the best. This is the place where my mom and dad used to take me and my two older sisters to spend over two months out each year when the schools were out.
For the longest time, there was no road to this magical place. My dad’s car was left parked on a cleared-out patch in the forest across the lake and his orange boat with a little pull-start engine took us over the lake to our cabin. Once per week my parents took the boat across and went shopping for groceries. It always seemed like they were gone the whole day while we kids held the fort and sat by the lake shore to wait for them to return. We waited patiently because they would bring us, Hubba Bubba, back from the store. Those gigantic pieces of gum were chewed on for days. My mom kept us on a tight leash and didn’t allow us to eat candy in our house, so the strawberry-flavored chewing gum was a long-awaited treat.
My mom was from a family of 14 children. Ten of her siblings had their summer cabins close to ours, on the same peninsula that was all family-owned land. Everyone had built their summer cabins around their ancestral home. This place was like heaven for us kids. Every single cabin was owned by either my aunt or my uncle. Wherever we would wander, someone would take care of us. Everyone was literally family.
During summer months, we would plant potatoes, lettuce, carrots, and turnips on our vegetable patch. Us kids were recruited to pick out weeds from the garden. The adults would dig holes in the ground around the patch and set water buckets in them as traps for field mice. Many times, we would find drowned mice inside those buckets. That was always slightly disturbing to me.
My dad would often go fishing with my aunt’s husband. They would set a large net to the lake from the boat, and then gather it back toward the shore standing on the edge of the forest that met the lake. As the net pulled in closer, the schools of fish would end up closer and closer, until they were captured at the back of the net with no way out. Two men were required to do this type of net-fishing and it took multiple hours. On the nights when the lake was still and no wind was present, we could hear the soft chatting of my dad and my uncle-in-law far away over the water. The wives were inside our cabin talking about life, sipping their glasses of white wine, and waiting for the men to return with the fish.
It was always exciting to see if Ahti, the Finnish deity of water, lakes, and fishing, had been generous. When the men returned, everyone gathered to admire the catch, and we all cleaned the fish together on the log table by the lake shore. Usually, we would get a bunch of tiny freshwater whitefish called muikku, and all of us learned how to gut fish. We kid too. You push under the gills with your thumb and pull out the gills, and the guts come out in one big clump, just like that! Go ahead, give me a small fish any day, and I’ll get it for you in a whip. We used our bare hands for the smaller fish. For the bigger ones, my dad used his knife.
I didn’t like the gutting part as much as I liked to play with the tiny fish. Often, they were still alive and I was allowed to carry some of them back to the lake. I loved to see them swim back to freedom. The ones we had cleaned, my mom would roll in flour and salt, and fry in a buttery pan to a brown crisp wonderfulness that we would eat with great appetite.
On Midsummer, which is one of the biggest national holidays in Finland, we would go visit family friends on a nearby lake. The Midsummer is celebrated around the summer Solstice and is always over a weekend toward the end of June. The tradition is to burn large bonfires to celebrate the lightest time of the year. At this latitude, the sun doesn’t set at all at night.
I loved these celebrations. All the adults were in good spirits, and we could play with our friends and stay up as late as we wanted to. After the sauna and bathing, we ate and set the bonfire ablaze. The adults were drinking wine and singing around the fire. Our kids would make “love spells” by collecting 7 different flowers from the fields and the forest. We would set the flowers under our pillows on Midsummer’s Eve and be supposed to see the face of our future husbands in our dreams. All of us children got to sleep in a small cabin outside the main house, while the adults had their privacy in the bigger cabin. The Midsummer is the celebration of love and fertility and the most common time for people to get married in Finland.
When the Fall started approaching, the berries and mushrooms appeared. I never much liked picking berries, but sometimes my mom would give me a mug and I would fill it with bilberries, the Finnish wild blueberries. When I came back with my mug, Mom would pour milk over the berries and I would drink the “blueberry milk”. My greatest joy was picking mushrooms. I learned early on which mushrooms are good for eating and which ones are poisonous. Even the ones that are not toxic, should be boiled briefly before preparing. I love mushrooms. It was always very satisfying to pick them since you could fill your bucket fast. Unlike berries. I was too impatient to pick berries.
When the nights started getting darker and colder again, it was time to return to our city home in Oulu. The house always felt so lifeless and empty when we got back from our over two-month-long summer retreat. It took us a few days to get back to our normal routines. By the time the school year started again in mid-August, we had re-acquainted ourselves with the running water, electricity, and neighborhood friends.
When I look back on my childhood, especially during those summers, the magic was always around. We were all so closely entwined with nature, living with its rhythm. Both of my parents had great respect for living things, trees, and animals, and they expressed gratitude for the bounty that the lake and the forests provided. Those summer months were like meditation for everyone’s minds even though we didn’t think of it as such at the time. The old beliefs about nature and its mythical beings were all around us. The spirits, gods, and goddesses still live and breathe in these lakes and forests. Up to this day, I keep my eye out for virvatuli, or the will-o-the-wisp. The flickering flames that may show up for the traveler in the lonely and desolate Finnish bogs allure the careless wandered to sink deep into the swamp or lose themselves in the woods. And still to this day, I know that the Fairies dance in the morning mist of the Finnish summer fields.
