On crabbing

ode to the infinitesimal delights of childhood summers

My earliest memories are dominated by time spent in my family’s three-roomed stuga, Swedish for summer cottage, in Väröbacka, a tiny town on the southern tip of the country. Our stuga was built by hand by my great-grandfather, beside the sea where the air tasted like home on my tongue. My dad swears it was better during his childhood, before the government built a nuclear power plant there, but to me, the thick-black power lines molding into the sky only made it more beautiful.

Each June, during Midsommar, thirty of my relatives would pile in, sleeping side-by-side on the beds, the inevitable over-flow of bodies strewn on couches and the floor. On the longest day of the year, my ten girl cousins and I picked wild flowers––daisies, bluebells, fireweed––from the nearby horse pasture, and laid them on the picnic table outside until they were dry enough for our chubby fingers to weave together into crowns. Farmor, Swedish for grandmother, my namesake, would sit each of the girls down and braid our hair, then delicately fit us with our new headdresses. I can still remember how skillfully her soft hands worked through my head, how her wrist rubbing gently against the nape of my neck would leave a soft scent of lavender behind, how regal she made me feel. Then all my relatives would don white and link hands around the Maypole, dancing and singing Swedish folksongs. My favorite was “Små Grodorna,” an upbeat jaunt that required everyone to bend at the waist, clasp their hands behind them and wiggle their fingers in the air, while hopping around the circle like little frogs.

After the dancing, Farmor took all sixteen of my cousins crabbing (the ten girls plus the six boys). “It’s time to go, time to go,” she’d say. Rain or shine she’d zip each of our rain jackets, and usher our little bodies behind her 5’11” frame down to the shore. We’d all sit on separate rocks covered in barnacles and gnarled by the sea, and dangle a piece of ham clinched to a toy fishing rod into the ocean, waiting for a strike. “I got one! I got one!” a voice would squeal, and lift a tiny eight-legged monster wriggling in a mad frenzy from the water. “Quick, grab a bucket!” another voice would shout. A chipped highlighter green plastic bucket would materialize, and PLOP, the crab would drop in. We stayed down there for hours. Farmor insisted that we could only leave when everyone had caught a crab, even if our socks were soaking wet and our fingers were purple and shriveled like prunes.

It is now week eight of my senior winter, a time dominated by forty-degree February heat, melting snow beneath my feet, and the sense that my girlhood is over. This June I will graduate from college and embark on my own cyclical Maypole dance into adulthood. I’m not sure what wriggling monsters will end up in my bucket. I hope I get some good ones.