The husband and I are doomed to yet another summer of rising early. It's because workers arrive every morning at 7 a.m. to blast and pound rocks in the courtyard of our building. It is astounding how much noise is required to lay a circular pattern of rough granite paving stones, checking and rechecking everything with sticks and metal rods and measuring tape in some undecipherable ritual devised to ensure that all the stones will fit properly in their places in the end. At least that's what I hope it's all about.



The Swedish word for the day is morgonpigg. It is an adjective that describes those annoying people who are, for some reason, all perky and chipper in the morning.



- by Francis S.

It was, and it wasn't a proper midsummer.



We took the ferry, a charming old wooden one that creaks and lets in a little water around the edges, and we sat in the corner at a table, happy to have gotten a seat since the ferry was as full as the crew will let it get.



We arrived at Birds Island, and we ate herring out on the porch under the overhanging roof, which protected us, mostly, from the drizzle. We drank vodka and Dutch gin, and we sang a few meager drinking songs appropriate for the occasion, all proper midsummer.



But we were too comfortable up at the house and having fun talking, and it was too cold and wet out in the meadow to bother to jump like little frogs around the midsummer pole out under the grey sky, or to gather seven different kinds of flowers to make midsummer wreaths to wear on our heads. And then we had dinner too late to go out and dance two-by-two on the jetty, although sometime after 1 a.m. I did bring the architect from San Francisco out to my favorite spot at the rocks at the end of the island to sit and watch the sea while the sun prepared to rise.



Late in the evening, O., the 16-year-old daughter of the fashion photographer, was trying out different ways of signing her name, as 16-year-olds sometimes do, and soon we were passing around our own signatures.



"What is that?" A., the assistant director said. They all wondered at the letters I wrote as they watched me sign my name.



"We don't use capital letters like that," said the actor, who had once played Jesus Christ on the stage. Apparently, sometime in the seventies, Swedish schools stopped teaching children how to write upper-case letters in cursive script, and now they are taught only the lower-case letters.



They made me write the entire upper-case cursive script alphabet.



"What about å, ä and ö?" the actor asked. I told him, silly, we don't have those letters in English, but he made me write them anyway.



The Swedish word for the day is handskriven. It means handwritten.



- by Francis S.

Midsummer is nearly here, the holiday that along with Christmas brackets the Swedish year, each feast day sitting solidly in its season and marking off its territory with nearly the same food: cold fish and boiled potatoes and hard alcohol. Of course, to a Swede the food is vastly different, but it all looks frighteningly similar to me, even if I have gotten to almost like herring. Almost.



"It's all downhill from here," I said to C., the fashion photographer. "After Saturday, winter is on its way."



C. laughed a weak little obligatory laugh.



We take the 11 a.m. ferry tomorrow out to Birds Island.



It's supposed to rain all day, and Saturday as well. The sun should come out on Sunday, however, about when it's time for us to leave.



The Swedish word for the day is sommarlov. It means summer vacation.



- by Francis S.

The heart of the city is the most desirable place to live in Stockholm. Which is unlike most cities in the States. Bereft of a middle-class, the typical American city is filled mostly with the poor, plus a smattering of bohemian-types with no children, a few odd rich people and a bunch of gay men. America just doesn't seem to care much about its cities, with huge chunks of urban America left to rot. So, it's nice to live in a place where people think the city is just great. I rarely cross the city lines.



But every so often, I have no choice. Such as this evening, when I had a work function which entailed venturing into the far reaches of Stockholm, a good 15 kilometers from town.



What was so disturbing was not the distance, but that the house I ended up at seemed to fit some bizarre Swedish version of the American dream of a house in the suburbs, complete with two-car garage, a lawn as carefully manicured as the fingernails of Miss America, and a flagpole with one of those long thin triangular Swedish flags.



Have I completely misread the Swedes and what they think is important?



Worse, is this what people really want, the world over, a house with a two-car garage in the suburbs?



I fear that I'm a terrible snob. I sound like a college sophomore.



The Swedish word for the day is kinkig. It means difficult to please.



- by Francis S.

One way of trying to understand the nature of a city is to reduce it to a gender: Paris is a woman, New York a man, for instance.



Stockholm is hard to place, all water and ochre buildings and opened like a heliotrope in the summer sun, but falls on the feminine side of the spectrum by my reckoning.



Now, off to catch the ferry out to the archipelago.



The Swedish word of the day is stadsbo. It means citydweller.



- by Francis S.

Yesterday evening, I went with the architect from San Francisco to see the Naked Chef give a cooking demonstration. The architect had originally gotten the tickets because his husband, the Dutchman, wanted to go. But the Dutchman was in Berlin, and my own husband was working, so it ended up just the architect and I.



The chef was, of course, neither naked nor really demonstrating. He was putting on a show, which seemed to be geared toward the vast majority of the audience: 15-year-old girls. He did cook a little bit, but he also sang, and played the drums, and flirted with the audience (strangely, he did this somehow shamelessly and shamefully at the same time), and didn't seem altogether comfortable on stage.



"What did you think?" the architect asked me as we fled the auditorium.



In typical Swedish fashion, I was circumspect in my judgement. It wasn't what I like, I told him, but it was, in its way, entertaining. And it gave both of us a terrible craving for curry. So we went to Koh Phangan where the decor is authentic Thai - all crazy bamboo and palm thatching and colored lights and the noise of crickets on a tape loop - and the chicken in paneng curry is about as satisfying as it gets.



The Swedish word for the day is kokosmjölk. It means coconut milk.



- by Francis S.

When we arrived at the jetty at Skeppsdal to go to Birds Island on Saturday, C. the fashion photographer was sitting in the little motorboat trying to get the engine to do more than just rev and die. He’d just barely made it over from the island to pick us up, but now it was hopeless and we weren’t going to get anywhere fast. So, we filled the boat with bags and packages, and he set off with the husband, the two of them taking turns rowing awkwardly in a boat not meant to be rowed, with the wrong oars and no proper place to sit.



Nearly an hour later, A. the assistant director and I at last stepped into the taxi boat to make our way to the island. We’d gone maybe a sixth of the way when we could finally see C. and the husband struggling against the shore of some other island, still far from being even halfway home.



When we arrived at the island, A. left with the neighbor in another boat to find them and tow them home.



“We saw the Finland ferry coming up and we were so scared, we just rowed and rowed toward whatever shore we could find,” the husband said afterwards. The ferry, which looks like a skyscraper floating on its side in the water, is no doubt a lethal weapon in this type of situation.



They were exhausted, but escaped with only minor blisters, bruises and scrapes.



The Swedish word for the day is hjältar. It means heroes.



- by Francis S.