It’s raining, it’s pouring, it’s wet, it’s gray and very chilly outside. It’s April in California and we are at home -self isolation and all that. The weather reminds me of rainy days in Ugglarp when I was little. Ugglarp was the summer house my father had built in the small village Ugglarp on the west coast of Sweden. It’s in the county of Halland, located almost equidistant between two towns, Halmstad to the south, and Falkenberg to the north. Our house was about 500 meters from the beach, up on the land before it fell away to go down to the sea, so we had an almost 300 degree view out to the sea and the beaches and rocks.
We had frequent storms, with thunder and lightning. We used to count when we heard the thunder: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven … The longer we could count before we saw the lightning, the better we felt because it meant we were not in the centre of the storm. Even though I was a bit scared I loved seeing the lightning. Sometimes you saw more than one lightning at a time. It was a spectacle seeing the lightning over the ocean, coming out of the dark thunder clouds, lighting up the whole sky and disappearing into the waves. We often saw curtains of rain in several places, and with the white tops of the waves, and the thunder overhead with lightning criss crossing the horizon -it was simply spectacular and mesmerizing.
My mother loved the storms also, and she would often take me with her down to the beach and we would go swimming and jumping into the huge crashing waves. It was exhilarating, that feeling of the white foam in your face, the wind blowing your hair every which way, the goosebumps on your skin, and then the heat of the actual wave crashing into your body, you submerged in the water and then getting some air as it withdrew. That second when I wondered if I would ever breathe again … and then running home in the rain to get out of the weather. Having hot chocolate to warm my freezing body and wrapping up in a warm blanket made me feel all safe again.
There were days when we were at Ugglarp where it just rained, rained and rained and rained some more. To relieve the boredom I and my best friend, Gittan, would visit the neighbors. They had a girl who was a few years older than us, but in spite of being older than us, she was nice to us. She knew things we did not and would show us how to play cards, play other games, and make paper dolls and paper clothes for them. Gittan and I loved making paper dolls and clothes. We would pretend the clothes were for us, and create all the dresses, skirts, blouses, shoes, hats we were not allowed to have or wear We would first make the paper doll out of stiff cardboard, about 10-12 inches tall. Then we would draw a face on it, sometimes trying to make it look like ourselves. We would create different hair styles that we could attach, so we could have our, rather the doll’s, hair down, or up, short or long, curled or straight.
The clothes, oh the clothes. We tended to go for incredibly beautiful evening gowns, even though we were perhaps 10 or 11 years old at the time. We looked in magazines at what the Royals wore, what movie stars wore, advertisements for women’s fashions. We never lacked for inspiration and our dolls had the most wonderful, extensive, colorful wardrobes you could imagine. They had, of course, also accessories like handbags, hats, gloves, furs, shoes and boots. They had to match each outfit and occasion. By the end of the summer both Gittan and I had a big cardboard box filled with several paper dolls and their outfits.