I’m writing somewhere just above Iceland. The last week was a blur. It started in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with my restaurant staff, then I drove directly to O’Hare and flew to Sweden for a couple days, and now I’m on my way back home…reflecting.
My mom and I have had this trip to Sweden planned for years. Armed with old photos and postcards, our plan was simple: to walk the stomping grounds of my grandma Ruth, who moved to the United States from Sweden as a teenager. She came from a small town called Gamleby, and we wanted to see where we came from, to feel what she must have felt like living there, and to connect to our roots.
We arrived at her little town in the morning in the mist. It was sobering. Have you ever gone back to look at somewhere you lived and it made you sad because you realized it held no meaning for you anymore? That’s how I felt in Gamleby. The decline of the city felt like the decline in parts of Illinois. Boarded up homes, vacant warehouses, businesses closed for good. We found my grandma’s old house, and the woman who lived there was kind enough to let us take a picture there. The view from the house is no longer of the water, but of the fenced off condemned cement silo on the beach.
We found the hill she loved to climb (she called it “the ant hill”), and couldn’t get far because the city put a water tower there. We went to the town square, and it was dead; we didn’t see a soul. Then we found her old favorite swimming hole. The grounds were in disrepair, and the once wild path to the beach was like a construction equipment graveyard. Still, we took pictures together at every stop, imagining what it would have felt like to grow up in that tiny village in the early 1900’s.
And then we left. Because whatever we hoped to find, it wasn’t there.
But I got 3 incredibly rare days with my mother. And we bumped into a couple lovely strangers and found an incredible scotch bar in Stockholm and had long conversations with each other over breakfast and saw a family of moose. And there were highlights. I’ll remember walking the troll forest with her and listening to old jazz music while taking the backroad to Västervik along the Baltic Sea. I’ll remember marveling at the purple flowers and moss and mushrooms that housed giant snails.
In short, I’ll remember my time with her.
Reader, places are just places. We can go almost anywhere and marvel all we want. For me, it’s our relationships with each other that make life worth living. I’m very grateful to have a restaurant family and a mother that wanted to take adventures with me this week, and I’m grateful to have a family to come home to. In the end, I don’t think any place or any adventure will ever hold more meaning than the people in my life. Stomping grounds are just grounds someone stomped. While we can, best get out there and do our own stomping. See you next Monday. -Em
