Yesterday was a crisp and clear day here, with a little frost in the morning, so my son Ian and I took off to the woods. Ingela and Lukas stayed at home recovering from a recurrent cold. It seems that we won't get rid of those colds this year.
The day started out bad. When driving the muddy road into the woods, I got stuck in the mud at the very place we always park our car, the frost in the soil is giving in to the sunshine and warm days and the road gets very muddy for months to come until mid June. So there we were, the car resting on its very bottom and we had to work for one half hour to get out of there. The whole car was covered with mud and so was Ian :) He reminded me of the boy in "I'm a boy" in some funny way. Then the saw-chain on one of the chainsaws suddenly flew off the chainbar. The oil channel had got jammed with sawdust and when there was not enough oil supported to the chain it got overheated and prolonged and jumped off the bar. Then the harness used to carry the brushsaw broke. Crap, crap, crappetycrap...
This small barn of logs you see in the picture is oh so typical for my home village. In my childhood they were everywhere in the landscape. Along the shores where people cut the grass from the shallow shores and stored in the small barns for the winter, in natural meadows in the middle of the woods and in small fields, worked up by draining bogs and cultivating it into fertile soil. This place in the picture was once a typical case of the latter. Drained and prepared in the middle of the 1930's by my grandfather and his sons.
Now it seems to be in the middle of the woods because these fields were reforrested by me in 1991. My mother stopped farming completely in the late 1960's after my father died in 1966. The fields were then used by her youngest brother until he called it a day in 1990. But it comes in handy as a storage for our stuff and as a lunch-break shelter.
In the second picture you can see what it is like nowadays. Spruce all over the place, interfoliated with birch. They grow fast in this cultivated soil.
Along our way into the woods we pass by a big anthill. One week ago there were no signs of activity there, but yesterday it was a hive of activity. Millions of ants working hard to repair the damages of last winter. The bright and warm sun had pushed them into action. The sun is warm during the days but still last night we had down to 8 degrees below the freezing point. Yesterday evening when we came home I tried to wash the mud off my car but the water started to freeze on the surface of the car. So spring has not really sprung, but it is close now :)
6 comments:
hmm... should we start running an ant farm...?
an Alien Ant Farm? :)
or ask adam if he could give up his :)
LOL! Is he still around?
Your forests look so much like ours! I enjoyed watching Ian in the doorway of the old barn(my son's middle name is Ian and my partner's older son has the same name).
I can see you have a rich love of the land - I like that.
As for the mud well...boys wanna come home all covered in mud!
Nothing like waiting for spring with baited breath!
Tell Ingela I visited her blog, but could not read a word of Finnish (I am assuming that is the language...)
But I did manage to pick out a couple of words - "The Who".
LOL
Hi Dale,
Yup it is Ian sitting in the doorway and Ian is a name that has gained popularity here in the Nordic countries.
The language in Ingelas' blog is Swedish.
Our mother tongue is Swedish. Swedish is one of the national languages in the bi-lingual Finland and we are still some 300000 swedish-speaking inhabitants, the most of us located along the west and south coast and on the Aland islands.
What we now know as Finland was in fact the eastern part of the Kingdom of Sweden until 1809 when Russia captured this eastern province now known as Finland.
We have a complete system with education, healthcare etc. in swedish but if you want to live someplace else in Finland than the abovementioned regions you have to learn, understand and manage the Finnish language completely.
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