The patron of Sweden

Over the past 30 years in Sweden I have read stacks of “technological poetry” and reflected enough on the ”timeless erection” [‘tidlös stake’ på svenska] that one of the architects of the Kaknästorn would evidently like to be remembered by. It has taken me many years, and many a twist and turn of words in the dark, to eventually confirm my own perspectives. Sometimes I wonder why it has taken me so long, but that’s another story.

In one of my diaries of early personal encounters in Sweden, I note that I ran into the quoted (last blog entry) Kaknästorn architect one day in the subway in Stockholm. We were both on our way to work in the Old Town. I recognized him because he had a quaint little house in the woods not far from my old country house, and sometimes stopped by to inspect my place.
He had also invited me once on a tour of his house, which I found to be a perfectly charming museum piece, a piously renovated and meticulously maintained 18th century cabin with no running water or electricity indoors. There were funky scrap metal sculptures and a little homemade generator along a dammed up stream that ran through the property. When there was enough water in the stream, a falling squirt was used to power a lightbulb in the outhouse, though it wasn’t working when I was there. This was where he chose to remind himself of his history. When he was there he always kept his Jaguar out of sight in the woods behind his house, as though it marred the timeless illusion. I was learning about Sweden and Swedes.

On the unannounced inspection days, he would park his Jaguar under the pear tree in front of my house. I might be up on the roof laying new tiles, on a ladder puttying the window panes, sanding the fir floors, laying bricks around a new hearth, or wallpapering – all in my attempts to make an old whitewashed miners’ residence that hadn’t been maintained for decades, inhabitable. I never remember him knocking, though I believed he should have since we did not know one another particularly well. He always seemed to appear in some sort of a professional capacity, somewhere between that of an industrial patron overseeing his foundry and a housing contractor inspecting his construction site.

Getting used to the patronizing manner of this man was part of the process of acclimation to the Swedish landscape. I was young, a female, and a foreigner to boot.


To be continued...