Oddly, it's the feeling of walking barefoot I remember the most.
I was six years old when my father took this picture of me. Dad always liked his camera. I was really, really blonde back then -- was almost platinum up to about 7 or 8 years old I think -- and this was taken sometime June-July while we were visiting my grandparents in Piteå.
My grandparents lived in Piteå from before I was born to until I was about 11 when they sold their house and the convenient store they ran, took their millions (and you only THINK I'm exaggerating) and bought a house in Skåne. Piteå, though. It's my childhood distilled into one endless summer day that lasted for years.
If I think about it, I can still feel that stony edge underneath my feet, rough and a little painful, but hot from the sun. It hurt like shit to so much as scrape your toe against that thing. I remember exactly what it felt like to place my hand on that bear hunching beside me and feel the stone warm from the sun, smoothrough underneath my fingers. I remember how cold that water in the fountain was and how angry my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles got if we got into it. I remember how pretty I thought the naked lady in the middle of it was, and how it felt to smooth my hand over that stone, cool and moist from the splashing water.
I can smell the place, you know? The flowers and the pines and the water in the morning after Grandpa had shut off the fountain for the night and the upturned earth from Grandpa's flowers and the musty way the carpet in the hallway smelled, a combination of old people and dust and sunshine.
It's that more than anything that I recall, you know. If I think about it, it's not so much the images -- grainy, like an old photograph -- that I recall, it's the smells and the textures of the whole thing. The way the stones in the courtyard bit into your feet when you stepped on them and how hot the green hose was underneath your feet when you balanced on it to get over to where Dad and Uncle Kjell had palled the ladder up against the garage wall. The way the grass on the front was always fresh and springy, but the grass at the back of the house was always wet and mossy and spongy because the sun only ever reached that far in the afternoon. How the grass at the side of the house where we used to play was always the nicest closer to the house and how it got prickly and full of pine needles underneath the trees and you almost had to wear shoes except we never did. I remember the asphalt underneath my feet and that weird oily feeling of the garage roof when we snuck up there while Dad was busy.
They had cars standing beside the garage, half a dozen of them at least, all of them in varying states of decay, except for the ones Grandpa and Grandma used and the big old truck that smelled like oil and old tarp, hot in the sun. I remember the feel of the open trailer when we crawled up on it, the hot smoothness of the metal and the pine needle ridden wood of the bottom that we balanced on. How the cars some days were too hot to touch and the way they smelled of rust and the moss that collected in the window frames.
I remember the night time. The feeling of the entry stairs under your dirty, tired feet, cool and a little painful. The way the fountain looked, all lit up in orange and green, and the sound of the water trilling. The bathroom where we scrubbed clean our feet in varying states of dirtiness depending on whether or not we had spent the day outside in the garden or if we had driven out to the shop and run around the stockroom. I never wore shoes in the shop if I could get away with it, because they hurt my feet, and the floors always felt grimy and a little oily underneath my feet, cool and dirty and soothing, nothing like the prickly plasticky stone floor in the backroom of the grill bar my uncle ran that was always uncomfortable to walk on.
I remember the smell of the kitchen in the morning and every time I drink my tea -- black with two lumps, nothing like the massive scoops I used to pour into it back when I was six -- and taste butter in the back of my mouth, I close my eyes and I can feel that kitchen all around me. Dark and a little cramped and filled with Crassulaceans, a tank standing at one of the kitchen counters that was at first full of stick bugs and then empty. Grandma never threw it out, and I wonder sometimes if it was because she missed those things.
I remember the carpet in the living room where I used to stretch out and play with dolls or cards or just look at the collection of LPs. It wasn't a very forgiving place to lie, tended to give you carpet burn just by lying down on it, but it was deep red, decorated with birds and flowers and pulling the strands one way would turn it an even deeper red. It always smelled vaguely of dust. The table was made of stone and wood and always cold underneath your palms. I can't tell you how many times I managed to scrape or bang my head against that thing. It was a clunky thing, stone top in light brown decorated by leaves, much like everything else in that house likely from the late sixties or early seventies.
I remember the feel of the metal edges on the bed in my youngest uncle's room. He was at university when I was a kid, and only at home sometimes, so his room always smelled like dust and, when my parents slept there, like after sun lotion. We used to bounce up and down on that bed, looking at the poster of flags he had on the wall and play a game where we would describe the colors of the flag we were looking at and the others had to guess of which one we were thinking. He had lots of interesting things in that room, Patrik, but we weren't allowed to touch most of them. I recall a little plastic gorilla with soft fur that we used to toy with, pinch the hands around our fingers until the skin turned white.
There were days when the heat outside got too much, and we would retreat inside. We were four cousins that used to come there, all girls, and we used to sleep in this tiny, tiny room just off the garage and the laundry room with the sauna. The room was stacked with bunkbeds, two on each side, and there was barely more than a foot of air between them, all that fit between them was a tiny window and a bedside table I invariable ended up hurting myself on -- my head, my hands, my feet, climbing out of bed the wrong way. The carpet was an ugly brown old thing that was rough underneath your feet. My oldest uncle, Kjell, had the room right next to it, and in the mornings when we woke up we'd lie quiet and giggle at the massive snores coming through the wall. His room always smelled the same as my brother's back home, dank and closed in. He had a tiny bathroom of his own, and the poor man was so worked to the bone, he fell asleep sitting on the toilet at times.
It was cool down there, the stairs that lead down to the hallway that was infested by ants and had doors in every direction, including our room. We used to sit on those stairs and read in the cool, dark stillness, balance on the edges, snub our toes on the plastic rim of the steps, play with tops that played music as they spun, blinking deep red and clear blue. At night, it got hot though, especially in our little room, four little bodies in four little beds, generating massive amounts of heat. We had a fan standing in the doorway and the hum lulled me to sleep at night. We always liked it when it rained too, and the sound would follow us into our dreams. I had a deeply complicated relationship to that fan though, I can't count the number of times I almost stuck my fingers into the rotating blades. My cousin fondly recalls a time when I even sleepwalked and tried to put my fingers in there and she had to call my parents for assistance.
The thing of it is, besides the facts of my grandmother (battle axe) and my grandfather (chauvinistic racist) and my aunt (hag) and the never ending battles between us cousins (or rather, the two oldest against the two youngest, Angelica and I almost never fought), I was happy there. It smelled of pine and sunshine and moss and rainwater and flowers and I was happy.
So. Yeah.