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This summer, I spent a couple of weeks of my vacation in a house built by my grandfather at the beginning of the 20th century. Each morning I looked forward to another cold, cloudy day. One of the days was not rainy, and my cousin and I decided to go out into the quagmire to pick cloudberries. It was a bit early in the season, especially considering that the spring was very dry this year. It was therefore no surprise that we could not find any ripe, yellow, and soft cloudberries. We picked the unripe, red, hard berries knowing that waiting means that someone else will pluck them. We decided to let them ripen on a tray inside the house. After a couple of days, they would be soft and yellow, ready to make the jam that is so popular here in Scandinavia.
Many rainy days this summer, I have been sitting by the fireplace listening to three novels by the Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg: The Emigrants , Unto a Good Land , and The Settlers . In these, he describes the migration of a Swedish family from Smaåland to Minnesota in the mid-19th century, a destiny shared by almost one million people. It was failure of the crops, poor living circumstances, and lack of freedom that forced them to leave Sweden and find a new home in the USA. The fate of Karl Oskar and Kristina, the main characters in the novels by Villhelm Moberg, still touches our hearts, something that is shown by the former members of the group ABBA—Björn Ul-vaeus and Benny Andersson—who based their musical Kristina from Duvemaåla, a worldwide success, on these famous novels.
Reading these novels reminds me of my mother, who emigrated from Finland to Sweden in the 1930s. She had suffered from polio as a child, with the result that her left leg was paralysed. As an invalid, she had no future in the countryside. She knew this and risked leaving her village with the hope of finding more freedom and security in Stockholm. I know that she was anxious at not being able to support herself and have a family. I know that she f