These
are the continuing adventures of a Swedish immigrant during her first
year as an American. She boldly went where she'd never gone
before...please come along on Adventures
in America.
When we still lived in Sweden, we
were really blessed to have a huge section of woods right at the end
of our little three-house street. There was the big street, which
had the name, Stråkvägen,
then there were about 16 of these off-shoot streets which had the
numbers. We were 8A. The C houses bordered the woods. The kids in
the neighborhood played in the woods all the time.
One
of our favorite activities was building forts. We did it right, and
the contestants on Survivor could have taken shelter building lessons
from us, let me tell you.
We
built this really awesome hide-out one time, with the help of some
older kids, who actually let us help build AND hang out. We ran into
a big problem though. The older kids told us rumors about a rival
group of older kids who wanted to find our special place and destroy
it. We younger kids were all very scared of this happening. Playing with the older kids (almost high school, as I remember) was a big boon. Well, we did have to bring snacks...
Let
me tell you, this place was the real deal. As I recall (and we've
discussed my recall enough) about 8 or 9 of us fit in there all at one time, and it
was nicely camouflaged from the outside. Long afternoons were spent debating whether
to just tear it down ourselves before “the others” did it, or to take it apart carefully and move it to a more secure location.
I
sure wish I remembered what we decided, but regardless of what it
was, we never had that special place again. In retrospect, I think
the older kids just tore it down, built another one (easy for them)
somewhere else so that they didn't have to put up with us pesky
younger ones anymore.
It
did spark some creativity in the younger set. Here are some of our
attempts...
(This is me, Swissie, and my best friend Ann-Charlotte, who was a magical two years older and taught me so much, including how to read (not exaggerating). She lived in 6A, as in behind our backyard)
(This is her younger brother, Joakim, who was in my class throughout school, well the three years I spent there, and we were very good friends, too.)
If you haven't noticed by now, the woods, the multitude of kids, and the special friends were what I missed the most about moving. I got used to the culture, but I only saw Ann-Charlotte one more time, when I was much, much older.
