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Pictures in the following segment are "borrowed" from a pdf file at stromstad.se [stromstad.se]
Walking around where I spent my childhood takes my mind on an unpredictable path.
The road didn't end here, back then, it would keep going, marked by three lines, the outer ones from cartwheels, the middle one a bit more bumpy from the horse that pulled the cart with heaps of horse manure every fifty feet, or so.
 It used to look like this, only the mid "lane" is missing, no more horses there.
Speaking of horse manure. There was this couple. He was a farmer, I'd say he was a bit crazy.
He had managed to find this precious, timid woman somehow and marry her. She had been pretty well off, she owned some land where she used to live, her husband took care of that money and invested in crazy projects that soon depleted her fortune.
As long as I can remember she would come to the grocery store in the same trench coat, summer or winter, probably the only coat she ever had. She had the saddest look on her face and spoke in a very soft voice.
She suffered from a heart condition. When asked about his wife and how she was doing, her husband would tell and I quote:
"As soon as I get her out to dig out the manure heap, she recovers in an amazing way".
He, on the other hand, would tell anybody who cared to listen how he had spent the previous night counting blood clots passing through his legs. He also kept notes of strangers, probably spies, passing by his property in the night.
Their house - it's still there - stood close to a pretty steep hill, facing north and with the sun standing low in the sky most of the year, their home was in more or less constant shade, making the whole situation even more deplorable.
They never had any kids, but they had two foster children, the older somewhat retarded.
He had some dysfunction or whatchummacallit, once he started laughing he wouldn't stop and we merciless kids would, of course, push the buttons to make this happen.
He fell in love with a girl, Esther was her name. He would chase her around the school yard. When we asked him why, he told us that he wanted to kiss "Goldie Rose" as he called her - freely translated from Swedish.
The younger of the couple's foster kids died from an aneurism at the age of 11.
That, besides being a tragedy for the family, was my first encounter with death. Until then it had been an abstract matter, a thing that might or might not hit the old people.
A ditch like this one sent me to the hospital at the age of 15. We used to take a shortcut over a field on our trips to court the few girls who lived where I grew up.
It was a pretty wide ditch and in order to jump over it you had to build up some speed.
So I did a night in November. What I didn't know was that the farmer who owned the property had put up a barbed wire fence along the ditch to keep the cattle from escaping.
I ended up hanging upside down with two barbs embedded in my thigh and a crushed elbow.
But you heal fast at that age, the doctors did a nice job putting the pieces together and it didn't take that long to recover. My wife teases me relentlessly about that very pointed elbow, almost like Pop-Eye's, it does look funny, not quite as it is supposed to be, but it works.
I tried to take advantage of my "medical condition" in school, we had a test, that I hadn't prepared for and claimed, that I couldn't write with my arm in a cast. The teacher didn't buy it and went to his room and came back with a typewriter..
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