A swallow zigzags behind me and in front of me and then sweeps quickly across the country road and the fields.

I look away towards the dark forest grove and further to the meadow with all the wild ash trees where I stepped straight into a viper's nest when I was a child looking for wild strawberries. I walked barefoot in clogs and next to the clatter of stones I felt their skin against my skin. I wasn't bitten, but I got scared.

The traces of this almost insignificant event have long since been erased, dug out, in everyone else; except me.

The sharpness remains regarding everything I was nourished and consumed by during the 70s.

Perhaps the people; who are still in the village and we who moved away, remember, at least vaguely, our little joint harvest parties, hunting and slaughtering moose and deer. The happiness of the chanterelle season, the buckets of raspberries, black and red currants, blueberries and lingonberries, for jam and juice, how we decorated the steps and swept it clean with freshly cut spruce branches around Yule and onwards until the snow gave up. Perhaps some of us remember our shared swimming sessions in the lake far away where we cycled or drove, or the fishing trips down to the Fyrisån River. Surely we remember the visits to the folk parks in other places, as well as the small funfairs and circus tents, the markets and the auctions. Those of us who are a little older survive by remembering. We probably remember most of it if we make a little effort.

The open agricultural landscape resting under the soft beauty of dawn and dusk was always picturesque and enchanting. The pouring rain, the hail, the blizzards with freezing winds, the summer heat and the mosquito plague, the awakening of spring, everything was clearer felt in me then than it is today. When the thunder passed, we unplugged the telephone jack, the lamps, the TV, and waited, listening in silence, while we counted the seconds between the lightning strikes and the bang to know how close it was. The dogs were always terrified and shaking. The next day you could sometimes see a tree that had been hit, and sometimes a house nearby had been hit.

*

The contrast between the city with its factories, the stinking oil spills and rattle of rusting and leaking cars, and various accumulated social problems, was palpable. The self-assertive were, as always, at war with the enormous stupidity of the whole world, as were all the addicts with their complexes on the outside and with difficult sorrows behind and ahead of them, and finally the tragically stunted socialist average Swede's contempt for academics and intellectuals whom they did not consider to be worth as much as real workers on the factory floor and in healthcare; these lazy students and old teachers were just goofing around and playing at the expense of their tax money; on their work made of suffering, sweat, and tears. The idealists just kept on gliding along in their blind optimism until they became neurotic and locked up for a time or two. Just like the "realists" became...

I am living on the wrong side of the river, but on the right side of the E4. With a narrow escape. I'm just 20 meters from the E4 and I constantly hear cars and trucks rumbling past, but that sound is something you block out to the background after a while until it becomes a faint hiss; so that after being away you can rediscover it as something completely new.

The start of school and homework, how hard it was to lace up your ski boots... The ball games, the bickering and arguing about trivialities, the TV programs that guided tomorrow's collective thoughts to follow suit. The earthy colors in all clothes and things, which as you know were mostly dark green, dark orange and brown. I remember that the light itself was somewhat different and more shimmery and that the air was cleaner.

Do you remember anything else?