Fika with the ancestors
An afternoon coffee break in the Swedish cow field that my great-great grandmother once called home.
I came home from Sweden with a small jar of soil in my bag.
It’s black and rich, almost sandy. Loose and broken up with a few pieces of moss and what I think might be the tiniest root hairs.
I gathered this loam on a sunny May Day earlier this year, just after Mother’s Day, on the land where my great-great grandmother was born in 1855 and where her mother died 19 years later using a small spade that Inger, a cousin I’d just met, had brought just for this purpose.
This soil came from a shady spot among rocks I’d never seen, grass I’d never sat on, brush that I couldn’t identify.
I’d never seen soil so dark, but this land was familiar.
Today, it’s a cow field in a rural area on Gotland island known as Lilla Åby. You can look across the pasture and see the top of the church in nearby Bro, about 20 minutes outside the historic walled city of Visby, where Karolina lived as an adult.
When my sister and I visited Sweden in 2016, we didn’t know that we had relatives still living on Gotland, but we visited that church because it was listed in some of the birth and death records of our family.
I knew my ancestor had been there at some point, and that was enough for me.
Just after we got back from that trip to Sweden eight years ago, I got an email from a man named Ronney who introduced himself as the husband of my cousin.
This reunion at the ruins was happening because of that message.
Through Ronney, we met two branches of the tree on this trip, four sisters on the mainland and a group of sisters who have stayed the closest to the ancestral roots.
Even though these sisters still live on the island, they, too, had lost track of exactly where our shared ancestors lived.
But, thanks to these emails and Facebook requests and the renewed interest in our greater family tree, they started asking around and eventually found this little plot of land that looked like a place for the cows to cool off.
The day in May, we parked next to this overgrown rock pile and approached with a sense of reverence.
“We are going to have fika with the ancestors,” Inger announced.
She pulled out a Thermos of hot water, a jar of instant coffee, two kinds of pastries, and a few plastic coffee cups and saucers for a traditional Swedish coffee break.
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