I Dip Into The City

I left London when I was 24, so I'm used to cities by now. Nearly. In contrast to London, Sweden's capital, Stockholm, is home to between 1 and 2 million people, depending on where the line is drawn. The city's structure is watery, and forests live between, and close to, even the most densely settled areas. 

Last week, I took a trip away from the farm on which I'm writing and being with P. We travelled together to Karlingesund Retreat Centre where we first met in February's Grief Ritual. We spent three days in the beauty of trees, rocks, water, and swam with stars (I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars). Then, when P. dropped me off at Karlstad station and drove home, I travelled on to Stockholm to spend time with my longest-serving Swedish friends.

The extraordinary thing about Stockholm is that so much of it is clean. On our first day together, C. and I took a bus, our walking shoes, swimming costumes, and sandwiches out to Bogesundslandets Nature Reserve  We walked along well-marked forest tracks, often by the shore. The sky was blue between the aspens, alders, birches, and pines, fluffed up by a scattering of white summer clouds. We talked as women who've known each other in visits which seem to me now, from the perspective of 45 of years friendship, like a chain of islands interspersed with stretches of water, some like small seas, some like rivers. Each of our island meetings over this span has felt solid under my feet.

Keeping to my one-outside-swim-a-day in August commitment - a commitment I made to the inner child in me that has always loved to be in water and which has been too often in distress this past year - keeping this commitment came naturally last Monday. After a couple of hours' walking, we looked for a way in to the water, then changed on the smooth surface of a huge rock. The shore-side was a little rough on our soft feet and we braved it, recalling those summers of childhood when, having gone mainly barefooted - C. in Sweden, me in England - our feet had hardened satisfactorily by August. 

As part of the Baltic, the sea round Stockholm has low salinity: around 1/4 or 1/5 of the saltiness of the open ocean. I like this: the way a low-salt sea swim leaves my skin clean and smooth. I paddled around in the wake-spill of boats which were to-ing and fro-ing between islands, safely distant, sending their waves to shore. 

After our swim, we ate sandwiches, then walked to Vaxholm, via a café, via an ice cream shop, and the comforts of coffee and blackcurrant gelato. 

The next day, back in the city centre, I walked to a nearby park. At the public swim spot was a crowd of students enjoying their first days back at university. The jetty was crowded, and the water bobbed with rafts and barrels as students raced and cheered each other on. I waited till they'd gone singing up the path, then changed and swam. A boat, moored at the jetty, wafted weed-smoke into the air. People strolled past. I felt aware of my phone sitting in my jacket with my pile of clothes on the side. But I felt safe. Later, C. and S. took me to a rooftop bar - we drank sangria, and watched the sun set into the arms of the city.

And then next day, we drove to the island where I spent much of that first summer visit in 1982. The Stockholm Archipelago and its beauty has stayed with me ever since, captured in a few photographs I still have at home. I don't remember swimming then - though I remember sailing and loving it. I'd learned to hold my body back behind clothes, to hide my embarrassments from the elements. I'd learned a resistance to wearing - even to owning - shorts. On the bluest days, when C's mother kindly laid a selection of shorts out on my bed for me to borrow, I resisted even trying them on. 

I am glad I've made it to this point in life: the point where I've learned that to wear shorts on warm days is to feel the air as kindness, and to feel gratitude to my legs for all the walking and swimming. I've learned, since trying it first in Australia, that to swim naked is to be held by water, skin-to-skin. In the quiet of late summer weekdays, and in this quiet and chosen month of my own late summer, I have swum in places in and close to the city which are so free, so solitary, and so beautiful, that I wanted to share them with you.