A Perfect Day

A favorite activity of mine to do with people I don’t know very well has been the 36 Questions that lead to Love. The title is misleading because, while the questions are ostensibly meant for romantic relationships, they really can be used with anyone you want to get closer to.

One of the questions on this list asks you to describe your perfect day. I have always described this more or less the same way: a day mixed with down time and some work, with no stress of commitments to make or deadlines but still with some purpose, and spent with people around me who I love.

I’ve always described this day as an ideal that I will probably not achieve but one that I can dream about anyway. But the thing is, in Finland, especially in the past month, I have had more than a few days that fit the bill.

I have a few things to thank for that. Chief among them is my boyfriend and his love of the summer cottage. We have spent almost every weekend this month at his cottage. The second is my courses for next year, which have assigned copious amounts of summer reading, meaning I am never without a book to read that, while not easy reading, makes me nerd out a bit to issues in education reform and curriculum design.

Summer cottage trips with the bf and summer reading make for the perfect combination for my perfect day. We spend the weekends doing various cottage improvement projects during the day, broken up by me spending hours of sitting outside in the sun reading the books for my courses. And then there are the many activities that make up Finnish summer cottage culture: sauna in the evenings, grilling fresh vegetables, brief (terrifying) boat rides in the archipelago, running in the woods.

Not to forget the fact that all of this is surrounded by so much nature that it is easy to forget that other people live next door.

I know I wrote about summer cottage life last year, but I couldn’t resist writing about it again. Last year I was writing about it as something novel and foreign, an experience to have a few times and then forever treasured in the annals of memory and photos on Facebook. But now, a year later, I have slowly started finding my place in this cottage. I have started leaving my own mark on it (in the form of curtains brought from my old apartment and a mirror I attempted to hang on the cottage wall). My hands have contributed to the new yard, to the terrace, to the storage shed.

Most of all, it exemplifies much of what I will miss most about Finland when I leave to go back to the States for some time: Nature, the bf, the absence of a constant pressure to do more, be more, live more. It also means that my summer vacation destination (if I get summer vacations anymore) will always be decided for me. Because summer cottages are where perfect days are made. And I hope of having many more of them ahead.