Adieu, Adine!

Dear Adine,

I wish I could have attended your funeral. It would have felt cathartic to commiserate with your family, friends, and the Tolg community. I would have enjoyed sharing stories of momentous encounters with you because you touched deeply the lives of so many. It would be nice were you still in Tolg. Now, I have no one to visit there, just my rowboat! Last summer when I visited, you seemed tired and you no longer took walks in the woods. It made us both sad that your doctor recommended you refrain from hugging, but you, at 102, were a good patient and obeyed. I enjoyed our little tradition in recent years: a lunchtime visit to which I brought pasta and pesto and some sweet cherry tomatoes.

When Mother and I discovered and fell in love with Tolg’s ‘tailor’s cottage’ in 2003, we had no idea that a huge part of our Tolg happiness would be generated by you. Honestly, I forget how we met, but we soon fell into a summer routine of long walks and of dining together at the cottage several evenings a week, always at 18:30. Usually, your dog-companion of the moment, lastly Mira, announced your arrival by rocketing in the kitchen door, tail a-wagging and sniffing around for savory tidbits within reach: drops of moose gravy, flecks of whipped cream. I’d untie my apron and go to the door, to see you passing the lilac wall and turning into the yard, when I’d yell, ‘hej, Adine!’ If dinner weren’t yet ready, you’d sit and keep me company in the kitchen while we sipped glasses of wine.

Many friends visited over the years—from France, Germany, Norway, Serbia, and the U.S.—and they sat spellbound as you animatedly related in flawless English stories I asked you to tell and retell, especially the adventures surrounding the engagement and marriage of your parents and your own adventurous, multi-month hitchhiking honeymoon around Northern Africa. A Swedish military officer stationed with his unit in Tehran to guard the shah shortly before the outbreak of World War One meets in 1913 a charming, Jewish, spinster in her mid-20s on a discover-the-world tour with her adventurous aunt. They flirt a few times during her visit at teas and polo matches and he proposes via a telegram sent to Stockholm a few weeks after her departure. She returns to Tehran a few weeks—or months?—later (after a proxy wedding with her brother-in-law in Stockholm, if I remember correctly) and having agreed to a life as a military wife, the couple departs for Samarkand in order to be married by a Lutheran priest (like most Jewish-Swedes at the time, your mother’s family was rather secular, although in my research I’ve noticed that boys in Sweden’s Jewish community back then usually married Jewish women, while Jewish girls often married gentiles, an effective way, technically, of increasing the Jewish community in that matrilineal culture. Interestingly, Swedish society is also matrilineal). By the time they arrived in 1914, World War One had broken out and Dad returned to Samarkand, while Mom returned to the safety of Sweden, taking the longer, safer route through Russia. The stuff of films!

And the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, apparently, since you married a Latvian, a creative like you, but musical rather than artistic. And, in that post-World War Two calm when Europe was busily rebuilding, you two decided to hitchhike across northern Africa! I—who barely remembers what it was like to travel without smartphones and credit cards, although an inveterate hitchhiker back in the 1970s—was fascinated and impressed by your tales of hitchhiking solo from one country to another (was it Tunisia to Morocco?) because your mail was sent to a postbox there and Janis was too sick to travel and how police furnished you with lodgings for a night. What about safety? Sunscreen? Water? Money? Your stories astonished and entertained all who heard them; they inquire about you years later, and your stories have traveled (and perhaps been embellished) further.

I remember, the second summer I was there, when you painted a portrait of the Tailor’s Cottage: how you set up your easel in Ole’s yard and stood in the springtime sun for hours on end, refusing both chair and refreshment. You captured the cottage in its best moment, when the apple tree planted when the cottage was built was in full bloom, a fragrant, pale pink headdress atop a stubby, gnarled trunk. My mother loved spending time with you, a kindred spirit, she felt, and admired your talent (my father was also a painter). She treasured the onion watercolor you gave her one visit; it now hangs in my kitchen above the watercolor you painted as a souvenir of our times together rowing. My father made a pastel of me alone in my rowboat as a teen – little background and a sense of spaciousness because I was on the ocean. Yours shows us (and Mira?), tiny shadows in a tiny boat on the tree-shaded canal linking Tolg and Asa lakes.

I don’t know how many times I’ve told the jasmine bush story: how you, in your late 80s bought one from the nursery only to discover two years later that it was the non-fragrant variety. And how you intrepidly returned only to find two years later that one was also non-fragrant. But the third time was a charm! That story has traveled around the world, I can tell you! Also, the anecdote about how you, in your 90s, decided to construct yourself concrete steps at your kitchen door that, while not quite up to a professional standard, serve their purpose.

Hanna and I would never have discovered wonderful Davidslund had you not showed it to us. It became our favorite walk and chanterelle patch until the forest by the iron-rich stream was clearcut a few years back. I have missed you and our walks since being forced to relocate in 2017, but looked always forward to my visits, even if they never felt like enough. I miss Tolg’s forests profoundly, and now I miss you, too, even if I know you will always remain in my heart. Your virtues—curiosity, fearlessness, optimism, patience, tolerance—will always inspire me. I love and miss you, dear Adine!