Dearest mormor

Swedish is great in that you can immediately understand that mormor means grandmother on your mother's side and morfar means grandfather on your mother's side. The same goes for uncle and aunt on the mother's side which would be moster (aunt) and morbror (uncle). Then it is the same on your father's side with farmor and farfar and faster and farbror. End of your weekly Swedish lesson. It was just so I could explain what the title meant.

The reason I was thinking of my dear mormor the other day was that my neighbour said that "It will soon be the time when your tree changes colour and the leaves fall. My grandkids love collecting the leaves and jumping in the pile." My thoughts immediately went to mormor who always saw great danger in very ordinary things. So if you jumped into a pile of autumn leaves you could get polio, it was very dangerous and deprived us of that little pleasure. Another thing, maybe less dangerous but still unpleasant was that if you were making horrible faces and the wind changed you would stay that way, for ever and ever. Needless to say, we could never go swimming after having eaten, we had  to wait for hours.

My mormor was looking after my sister and me after my parents split up and our mother went back to work. Mormor obviously had to retort to some weird threats. When it got really desperate she would make pretend phone calls to a special school for unruly kids and explain that we had been very bad and then she would ask if they could take us on. We would be ready to do anything to get out of that and she would forgive us and all was well, for a while.

Please don't worry, I think no harm was done and it was just her way to deal with difficult situations.

This is taken just about the time when mormor started looking
after us full time.

This is taken at mormor's confirmation when
she was fifteen years old.

The last thing before I leave the subject of mormor is that,  especially in the winter, my sister and me would sit on each side of my mormor's arm chair and she would sing for us. It was not very happy songs but something that was called  "Skilling tryck" in Swedish. It was mainly sad songs about people suffering terrible hardship, famine and death. The mother often died and the father was often a drinker. Another theme was unhappy love, where one or the other died tragically.  The result was that when my mother came home from work she would find me and my sister crying our hearts out.

On to another subject, we have had visitors from Melbourne, which was very nice. We drank a bottle of wine that they bought in France when they came to visit us there from 1989. I will not make any comments here on that since I am not a great wine connoisseur, but it was very dark. There was also an Australian wine from 1974. Don't get me wrong, I like wine but I can't get all the little nuances, like banana skin, vanilla, berry, licorice, or sunlight through a stained glass window. I am a little simple when it comes to this, it is either red or white and sometimes rosé.

It is a sad day today because one of my favorite singers died unexpectantly at the age of 57.
I saw a weather report from Newtown that said that today would be cloudy and grey with Purple Rain. RIP Prince!