Category: Reflections

My mom had me when she was very young, so I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents. They lived in the countryside about 90 minutes from Stockholm, where they grew their own vegetables, and my grandfather was a beekeeper. He loved his bees and believed just about everything could be cured with a bee sting and honey.

Looking back, everything seemed so green and beautiful.

Just down the road was a farmer where I would go to help out, mostly because I wanted to be around the animals. That’s also where we bought our milk. If it was cold outside, Grandma would leave the milk on the porch. Otherwise, it went into the refrigerator, where the cream would slowly rise to the top.

Every morning she would take a spoon, carefully skim off the thick layer of cream, and pour it into a glass. Then she’d look at me with a smile and say, “Now this is real skim milk.”

The joke, of course, was that I insisted I wanted the skim milk from the grocery store.

There were only two buses a day from their little village into the nearby town of Avesta. Sometimes we’d take the bus to swim at the indoor public pool or simply wander through the shops. When you’re a child, everything feels enormous. The town felt like a city, and even an ordinary bus ride felt like an adventure.

My grandfather came to Sweden from Poland after the Second World War. He met my grandmother, fell in love, and stayed. Even on the day he died, he still spoke Swedish with his own unmistakable accent. He was a wonderful grandfather to me, although I later learned there were other sides to him. My mother, aunts, and uncle have shared stories of how hard he could be on the family. It’s funny how we can know the same person so differently.

Memory has a way of opening one door after another. One thought leads to the next until you’re wandering through places you haven’t visited in years.

One thing I remember my grandmother saying was, “The older you get, the faster the years go.”

At the time, I thought, Right…

Years felt endless. School semesters seemed to last forever, and summer vacations felt like entire lifetimes.

The funny thing is, I don’t ever remember my grandmother being young. Looking back, I realize she was only 42 when I was born. Forty-two. Younger than many grandparents are today. But in my mind, she has always been wearing her house dress, with her short curly hair, standing in the kitchen, always baking or cooking something.

She was one of those people who always seemed to be in good spirits. Looking back, I know she had lived through difficult times, yet she never lost her sense of humor. Even in the final years of her life, she was quick with a joke and somehow managed to make the people around her laugh.

Now, years later, I finally understand what she meant.

The future has a way of arriving quietly. Things you once thought were impossibly far away are suddenly here, and something that happened a year ago can feel like yesterday.

Maybe time doesn’t actually speed up.

Maybe we just get better at noticing how precious it is.

That’s also why I choose to write the way I do.

Life has never been free of heartache or worry. Like everyone else, I’ve had moments that changed me, and there are stories I may tell one day. But there is already plenty in this world competing for our attention: headlines, arguments, and reasons to feel overwhelmed.

This little corner of the internet isn’t meant to ignore those things. It’s meant to make room for something else.

I want to remember the taste of fresh milk from my grandparents’ farm, my grandmother’s laugh, the adventures that felt enormous when I was little, the dogs sleeping at my feet, and all the ordinary moments that quietly become the memories we treasure.

Because when I look back on my own life, it’s the ordinary moments that have stayed with me the longest.

And I’ve noticed something else. Many of the stories that are hilarious today were anything but funny when they happened. At the time I worried, cried, overthought, or wondered how I’d ever get through them. Twenty years later, they’re the stories that make everyone around the dinner table laugh.

I wouldn’t choose to relive them, but I have learned that time has a remarkable sense of humor.

That’s why I write about the lighter side of life. Not because difficult things don’t happen, but because eventually, if we’re lucky, some of them become stories instead of burdens.