Deer in Sweden love fika 02

During her last visit in November, her parents talked a lot about a friend of theirs, Wilma Hansson and how she was forced by nature to retire in a nursing home. They talked about how alive she was, playing old familiar tunes in the piano, every time they visited her, and remembering the days they all used to go dancing in one of those tango summer places.

Her father said how much he enjoyed dancing with a woman who knows how to dance and her mother pretended that she was jealous. All a game full of memories about their friend retiring in a nursing home, something they said changing tone to quieter every time they used the word.

Especially her father seemed a bit more frustrated than usual keep repeating, ‘this should have never happened to Wilma.’ Her mother told her, when they were alone in the kitchen preparing coffee, that her father had taken the whole thing very hard.

“You remember how close we were with Wilma, she was there in your graduation and she was there later when you took your bachelor. She was our best friend and after her husband died we somehow came even closer.” Monica didn’t say anything but she felt that he mother might have taken a harder hit than her father. She just didn’t want to admit it.

“Mom,” Monica said watching her mother for some kind of awkward reaction, “is it Alzheimer’s?” Her mother didn’t say anything, she just nodded and Monica suddenly felt like hanging her.

“It was so unexpected,” her mother answered after a few silent seconds. “Not that there were signs but …we saw them later. When it was all over and official.” Monica remained quiet.

“It was the repeating stories and the forgotten names. But nobody said anything because…” and she pause, took a deep breathe and added “because we all do the same.” And now she hanged her.

Later on her way home and all this time since then, she kept thinking about the whole thing and the more she was thinking the more scare she was becoming. Imagine one day going for dinner and her parents, her mother or her father, not recognize her. She had read stories about parents even getting angry with people they didn’t recognize to be their kids. A numbing nightmare. She did remember Wilma. A very alive and restless woman. Coquette, an attractive woman despite her age. And a good dancer, she smiled remembering her father’s words.

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Read all the Deer in Sweden love fika chapters in order, HERE!

Deer in Sweden love fika 01

Twice a week, Monica visited her parents in their small over-furnished apartment they lived since after she left home, after they both retired and after they decided to somehow downsize their living surroundings, work and expenses. “House is too much work for people of our age,” her father used to say the first period they moved to the apartment with her mother nodding in agreement.

Retirement had also changed them both physically and mentally; it had somehow shrunk them. Both well in their eighties, both wrinkled and pale pink spotted skin, both with a gradual tenancy to stoop more and more. And all that while they seemed to look more and more alike as though older age had made their features bled into one another. They even smell the same which was not always a pleasure scent.

Every time she went to see them she would find them either sunk into the sofa watching television or in their small balcony quietly drinking tea and scanning the area for birds or squirrels. They had discovered new senses of wonder. They marvelled the corky ways of Mr squirrel – they actually called him Mr both sure that it was a young gentleman in an animal form – and the tender ways of the sparrows. They were a few of them always different, making difficult for them to separate genders.

“Maja, did you see him? Did you see what he did? Oh, he’s definitely the buoyant type. You know what I mean…”  And she always knew. “Just like Lucas,” she would add after a few seconds and that was the other new element in their new styled life. Their baffling need to recall huge amounts of stories from their past, always about people who strolled in their lives between fantasy and reality.

Once while watching a small sparrow carefully checking the bread trims her mother had thrown to the ground from her first floor small balcony, she had told her of how much all this reminded her of her old friend Ines who was very sick but always very careful with her food and once, when she was really young, she had eaten a fly something that had scared her for the rest of her life. “She told us the story every time we saw her,” Monica’s father added in the end feeling obliged to be part of the narrative.

That was another thing with them, but it had always been there at least for as long as Monica could remember; they always felt obliged to support each others stories. And they would go to extremes for that even ‘remembering’ stories and people from each others childhood they never actually met.

Monica’s father held family’s imagination. He could make stories out of nothing and repeat them always adding something new to make them more interesting. Monica had taken from her mother. She could only comment, never say a story. She couldn’t even add something even times she actually had lived the story that was unveiling from her father’s mouth in front of her.

Now getting older their stories were moving to new pathways where imagination and false information occasionally star next to reality. The other day her father spent nearly one hour explaining to her how blessed water from their local church cures rheumatics. She mumbled, ‘nonsense’ but he didn’t hear her.

However, twice a week she was there, sitting with them, listening their stories and observing how it is to live a new childhood in an old age. For them she was the highlight of their week. Their faces lit up every time in her sight and while waiting for the coffee to get ready old prying questions reappeared just to keep family traditions, “when will you give us a grandchild? Have you met a nice boy to bring around to introduce us?” and while these questions brought certain tense in the past, nowadays it was part of the dance Monica had started enjoying dancing with them. It was like a well rehearsed choreography they had to perform every single time.

And then early in the evening, especially on Sunday, after a big lunch with chicken and new potatoes –her mother always called them new potatoes, driving on the way to her house she would wonder if that would be the last time she would see them both alive. If before her next visit would be a phone call telling her to come right away. The thought was always there filling her with a strange mixture of pain, nostalgic memories and sadness that stayed with her all the way till she arrived home. Still and in a very twisted way she knew that if she had given them grandchild or a boyfriend she wouldn’t have the time to visit them so regularly leaving her with pain, sadness and regrets.