midsommar
Midsommarafton (Midsummer Eve), the most Swedish day of the year. Hedda's family has a little red house on Vrångö, an island in the southern archipelago, so this morning we took tram 11 all the way out to Saltholmen and then the ferry, with a bag of strawberries on my lap the whole way.
We put up the maypole, covered in birch leaves and flowers, and danced around it doing small frogs, which is a dance where you pretend to be a frog with no ears and no tail. Grown men do this. Pickled herring, new potatoes, schnapps songs, rain at three, sun again at four. Hedda's dad cried during a song about a cottage.
Tradition: tonight you pick seven different kinds of flowers without saying a word and put them under your pillow, and you dream about the person you're going to marry. Hedda's mum made us do it. I have clover, buttercups, a daisy, something purple and three other things I can't name under my pillow right now.
There's no mirror in this room. I checked.