My Family

My family is Swedish, as am I, and they all live in Sweden. I have three younger brothers as you will see.

First, these are my parents:

The photo is from the seventies sometime and before my time, but I love this picture. My parents loved sailing and would go every summer with their friends, into the archipelago (clusters of small islands off the coast, reaching far out into the Baltic Sea) or to either one of the two big islands off the southeast coast - Öland or Gotland. When I was born they took me too, and every summer after that until I was 5, when it was time to move into a bigger house as I had a younger brother. That meant selling the well loved sailboat (it was called Cirkus and had a smiling clown on the side).

Nowadays my oldest younger brother has a sailboat again, and occasionally they go, but for our childhood we either went on friends' boats or we had holidays on islands we could be taken to. I've grown up by and in the ocean (well, the Baltic Sea is not so much sea nor ocean, but a large lake connected with oceans, making the water brackish - sweet with a pinch of salt) and I love going on boats or running along the softly sculpted cliffs on our own archipelago island. This island became ours when I was 16 and I spent every summer there until I was 25 and moved to Britain. Now I mostly spend a couple of weeks there on visit. When I discovered yoga I would do my asanas on a nearly flat, but very smooth, rock on the northeast facing side of the island where it was quiet. Afterwards I would hop barefoot and light-footed from rock to rock along the water edge back to the house on the southwest side to join the family for supper.

My brothers and I, well the two oldest as the youngest one was too little, would play in the water a lot of the time and could spend hours falling off and climbing back up on a windsurf board. Without the sail mind you.

The oldest, Carl Henrik, is now 25 years old and he studies economics at the university in Stockholm, where he lives with his girlfriend. These photos are also old, a few years, but I like them a lot and look at them often. Carl Henrik was my best friend for a long time growing up and we were up to a considerable amount of mischief, considering what wellbehaved children we were.

Gustaf is 21 and has recently finished his military service in the navy. He is going to Shanghai in the autumn to study Chinese for several months. Love that laugh!

The youngest, Carl Fredrik, turns 12 this year. He is such a sweet kid and I love him so much. Cheeky no doubt, but he has a big heart. He needs that wetsuit as he runs off the dock he is standing on, where we moor the boats on the island, and jumps off the edge. And then again, and again, and again.

Every summer there are projects to be done, and my parents love it. That time it was a patio to be built in the protected corner behind the storage shed and all the stones, roots and rubble had to be cleared to make it reasonably level. That's me in the middle wearing hat. Gustaf wasn't around that time.

I love my family and I know they miss me tremendously, as I do them. We meet several times per year though, and those limited times become even more precious to me.