Danish summer...

Light evenings always make me think of summers spent in Denmark as a child. My Mum is Danish and so every year we would make a pilgrimage back to see our family and to spend lazy summers around the lakes, just outside of Copenhagen.

I remember balmy evenings in that clear Scandinavian twilight, as the grown-ups drank wine or Campari and my cousins and I would hope that no one would insist we went to bed. Our days spent at the beach or in Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens, riding roller coasters and eating so much liquorice it made our stomachs ache.

via skona hem

I recall my Grandmother's (Mormor's) homemade gooseberry flan, made from fruit from her garden,  and sipping her elderflower cordial. Hours spent as a child, listening and absorbing a language that I didn't understand but whose intonation soothed me nonetheless. Even now if I hear Danish spoken, it is so familiar to me at the same time to being completely alien. I barely understand a word. But the sounds, they are like a lullaby.

I get this every now and then; a hit of childhood nostalgia that I can virtually taste. I figure this is how it works - things that happened thirty years ago are as memorable as things that happened yesterday. I like being acutely conscious of these memories though, they are what make me...me.

via skona hem