How is it possible that it’s fall already?

When we last updated the Swedish Mosaics blog, we were busy pouring ourselves into our summer garden.  Our big enemy in the garden this year:  SLUGS!!!  They had a royal feast enjoying appetizers, first and second courses, and even a healthy dose of dessert as they munched themselves into food comas on our hostas! 

 

Summer 2024 included loads of Sunday evening worship services (6 of them, to be exact!) with new people looking for peace and a place to call home ~ all the while looking for Jesus and perhaps not even being aware that He offers the peace that we all desire in our hearts.  New faces quickly became new friends.  Our spring ALPHA course, which took a break in late May so that we could go home and celebrate with our families (90^th birthday parties and meeting new babies in our families), wanted to re-up and continue the course.  So, continue we did and had a great time enjoying community, ALPHA, deep conversations and lots of really yummy watermelon!  Not sure what was going on in the world this summer 2024, but we had such amazing watermelon here….of course, most of it imported from other parts of Europe.  But we sure did get our fill of the soft, red flesh and tossed out the seeds when they showed up!

 

Our place of worship ~ Sunday evening services allows us to appreciate a new glimpse of our church with the evening sun ~

A summer highlight included a midweek short visit to Värmland, the region in the middle of Sweden where Barb’s grandparents left to begin their journey to North America.  It’s always a joy to get back to Värmskog (mormor’s home village) and Lysvik (morfar’s village).  This summer was no different.  Deep spiritual conversations with the cousins (second cousins but since none of us have much family, it’s really like discovering first cousins who have lived on different sides of planet earth!). Sweet summer raspberries were in full swing, and we even transplanted 10 raspberry plants into our garden back in Malmö (5 white raspberry and 5 red raspberry). 

Barb's great grandparents gravestone in Lysvik ~ where the journey for morfar (grandpa) began...

 

When you get to certain regions of Sweden, you can easily understand how Swedish immigrants landed in northern MN, the UP of Michigan and northern Wisconsin ~ this is actually the lake in Lysvik, Barb's morfar's home village ~

And wonder of wonders, we have relatives in Valparaiso, IN!!!  True fun story…when visiting the woman whose now deceased husband was Barb’s mom’s first cousin, she informed us that there had been a family reunion of the Erickson (or as here in Sweden Eriksson) side of the family on midsommar 2024, which was the 21^st of June.  They had tried to call us to invite us to join in on the reunion, but during the week that they called, we were still in the US and our Swedish phone numbers were not working.  Mal chance, as our French speaking friends would say.  (Too bad!). But no worries…we were able to get some new contact info on second cousins who live just 15 miles away from Barb’s sisters in Indiana.  Who ever knew??!

 

Barb saw pictures of her morfar, Emanuel Johannes Eriksson in Sweden that she had never seen before ~ of his youth, when he first emigrated to Chicago.  The details in this picture explain more about why we didn't get to the family reunion in June 2024.  But there will now be a family reunion one day in Valparaiso, IN!!

Why is it that summer always has to go by so quickly??  Some things don’t change!