No summer house, later
Many years ago, I read a story about the tragic circumstance of «not owning a summer house». For the life of me, I couldn't understand what had prompted the author to write such a text. I was young. I had no idea.
Today, 15 years and two children later, I know what was meant. Because I don't have a summer house either. The summer house that I don't own is not in my home country of Finland. There is no steep path leading from the crooked, almost hundred-year-old house down to the lake.
And at the bottom, hidden behind a small cliff, you won't find the old sauna, which my father didn't renovate back in the summer of 1984 and in which it doesn't smell so wonderfully of tar wood. I never sat on the floor in the dark heat as a child and listened to my uncle make the same joke every time the heat wave from the first infusion hit my face like a red-hot whip: «This, children, is better than sex.» The sauna also doesn't have a veranda with a small wooden bench, which is where I like to sit after cooling off, my feet propped up on the railing, a beer in my hand and a view of the other side of the lake.
I didn't pick raspberries here every summer with my cousins behind the house (once two litres in an hour and a half!), we never went swimming all day and never lay on the rocks in the sun to warm ourselves. And we never rowed over to the uninhabited island in the old boat to collect chanterelles and later watch our mum fry them with butter in the pan.
I can never teach my children what I have never experienced myself.
In the evenings, we children never sat in front of the crackling open fire, which we - this was an iron rule! - were only ever allowed to light with a match and without paper. And my father never woke me up on the night of the first Wednesday in August, when crayfish season begins, to hunt for the primitive creatures on the shore in the dark, armed only with torches.
The house has not experienced many things. Not the great storm of 1967 and not the ice winter of 1981, when our neighbour froze to death in his house. Nor did it experience the widening of the road, the dispute with the new neighbours or the excavation of the large gravel pit.
And now that I have children of my own, I don't come here every summer with my family. So I will never be able to teach my children what I have never experienced myself: I will never show them how to gut a freshly caught fish, how to orientate themselves in the forest without a compass, or where the rock is that I didn't kiss my cousin's girlfriend on that night in July.
A new summer is about to begin. And I'm already looking forward to waking my non-existent summer house from its hibernation. Nine months ago, I didn't lock the shutters, pull the rowing boat ashore or put the key under the stairs, and that's exactly where I won't be fishing it out again soon to welcome a new summer. Oh, if only everyone had a summer house like the one I don't have.
