Skip to main content

Summer (Cottage) Fun


This is a very selfish post. I am writing it purely to relive memories because, even though I have absolutely loved being at home for this week, eating my mother’s cooking, meeting friends and remembering what 30° (90° for my American friends) weather feels like, part of me misses Finland.

I probably wouldn’t miss it so much if it weren’t for a weekend trip I took before leaving to a friend’s summer cottage. It was quintessentially Finnish. (And then later that week we made hernekeitto and pannukakku. You can’t get more Finnish than that.)

The cottage was tucked away in the middle of woods. Though there were two other cottages not far from ours, we couldn’t see or hear anything from our neighbors, thus giving the illusion that we were completely secluded from the outside world.

Cottages are generally located near a body of water, either a lake or the ocean. This cottage was by a lake. It actually belongs to my friend’s mother who spends almost every weekend as well as six whole weeks of the summer at it. Much of this time is spent doing extensive renovations, most of which she does herself. The cottage is like her baby and I felt honored to be able to stay in it for a weekend.

Those two days were magical. When we woke up in the morning, the sun had already reached the height of the trees and there was light until well past 11. With there being light for so long, my first instinct was to try to fill up the day as much as possible. But that is not the point of being in a summer cottage.

Over that weekend I learned to stop worrying about filling every moment with as much activity as possible or about trying to do everything possible. The go with the flow approach made it easier to savor each moment. It also meant we didn’t get through half of the things we talked about doing so another trip is now a necessity.

My friend talks about the cottage a lot. One evening, he spent the majority of our conversation sharing memories of his father’s cottage when he was young and talking about the renovations. He was enthusiastic so I tried to be a good friend and show excitement but I couldn’t understand the fond attachment. Who would want to spend a summer living in a house where heating it requires you to collect firewood every night?

Two days was all it took to enlighten me. There have been articles about how being in nature improves your mental health and well-being. Something about being in the middle of the woods with only the sound of the water gently lapping against the shore and the wind rustling in the trees is soothing to the mind and soul.

I don’t think I’ll be chopping firewood any time soon. But who knows. I’m going with the flow.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Heart of the City

The past week in New York was jarring to say the least. Though the city still makes me overwhelmed by even the smallest of tasks (where do you go to buy a pack of cards??), I have begun to slowly get used to the constant movement of the city and everything that comes with it. The sound of airplanes flying constantly from La Guardia over my apartment doesn't register any more. I can estimate how crowded the train will be based on what time I am leaving my apartment in the morning or TC in the evening. And although the feeling of always needing to do more still raises the specter of anxiety to make everything I do feel inadequate, I've become resigned to its presence to the point that it is part and parcel of the city itself. Solitude is rare in the city, but last week it was the norm All of these things fell apart this week though, one by one, as another phantom seeped into our lives. Starting with an email from our college president that optimistically called off only no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Critical Wisdom

The Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College has a reputation for being difficult, especially at the doctoral level. It isn’t difficult in the way my advanced data analysis class is difficult, where we are expected to learn complex statistical concepts while also learning how to code in the dreaded Stata software. Instead, it is impossibly abstract and theoretical, with most classes requiring us to write papers where we construct complex arguments supported by plenty of other people’s theoretical musings. These frameworks challenge us at our very core, a process that is fraught with emotional ups and downs, so much so that a professor in the department has called the program as a “Pedagogy of Monsters” and written an article about it. The program has changed the way I see the world. For example, I recently went to go see Isn’t it Romantic with some colleagues from the Writing Center. Besides the social aspect of actually going somewhere that wasn’t to work or acc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Holding Sand

 My mother once gave me the sound advice to avoid holding tightly onto things (she was specifically talking about people at the time) because if you do, they have a habit of slipping away. She did this through a marvelous metaphor that went like this: If you have sand in your hand and make a fist, the sand begins to fall out and you are left with less sand than you started with. If you gently cup you hand and let the sand come in however, it remains in your hand, and you can perhaps even add more. This metaphor has stuck with me because it helped me with the problem that I was having back then. But I’ve come back to it again and again and slowly been realizing the smaller and more subtle ways that I grab onto things. These things are now always visible or tangible, but they still have important implications. Take meditation. I meditate every day. It’s like brushing my teeth, I simply can’t skip this part of my day. But unlike brushing my teeth, which is a methodical and easy ...
Post a Comment
Read more