A winter walk in snowy Småland

The farm of my parents has been in our family for a long time. When I was a kid, my grandparents lived on the second floor of the house. It is one of four farms, arranged around a crossroads in the small village Örsåsa, in the woods of rural Småland in southern Sweden. The barn holds sheep of a neighbour in the wintertime. I snapped these photos ane cold, dry and sunny day when we took the dog for a walk at the end of January 2006.

Robin The Dog, our wild Jack Russell terrier, was in surprisingly good shape, considering that he will be 15 years old this coming summer (July 1, 2006, for those who want to send a birthday bone). Robin is the small, white, pig-like creature in the middle of the road, sprinting away.

Only the gateposts remain as the fields are used for other, less labour-intensive things than grazing cattle and raising cereal. The gates used to be everywhere, but with the increasing car traffic they slowly disappeared together with the roaming cows and calves.

Hmmm... maybe someone should have collected these logs before the snow came. I remember my father and grandfather working in the forest in the winter, hauling logs out of the woods with our two horses (this was in the 1950's). The snow helped. Nowadays the machines work the forests all year around, snow or no snow.

North and south of the main village are two farms called – North and South. In Småland we keep things simple. For details, please read the nchildren books by Astrid Lindgren, especially the Bullerby-series (immortalized by film director Lasse Hallström).

All oaks used to belong to the Swedish king. It was war equipment, used to build warships to control the Baltic Sea. In the winter the leaves of the young oaks look less royal, but make a nice, rattling sound in the wind.

You see the tracks from wild animals everywhere; rabbits, deer, foxes, mice, wild boar, weasels, moose, lynx... and some say wolves as well. Maybe not so far south, but in Stockholm, sure! And just a couple of hours north of the capital there are forests full of bear. Welcome to Sweden, Kingdom of the Wild.