Risön, Kalix, Sweden

My brother John is a great resource for photos from up north in Sweden, especially since I have not been back home in a million years. We were instant messaging this morning and I mentioned that I had tried to check out our old house in Risön, Kalix on Google maps but it is just too rural/too far north to be visible in any detail. Not to worry, he said. He had a recent photo he had taken while driving past it and funny enough, the house looks exactly the same as it did over 20 years ago!

The little house in background of the picture below was the house me, my brother and my mom moved to when my parents separated. It was nothing special at all, certainly not the nicest house you have ever seen but given the circumstances the saying ”beggars can’t be choosers” was not far from the truth.

My brother and I shared the only bedroom of the house, we slept on two of those temporary folding cot beds next to each other with a little night stand in the middle, and our mom slept on a bed in the living room. Oh, and our bedroom also doubled as a scrap yard for normally very nice and shiny model cars. Being boys and all, we had a keen interest in taking apart all of our toy cars for the sole purpose of trying to put them back together again. It rarely worked.

As our house was a bit on the older side, it also had a food cellar under the house that you could access with a hatch in the floor in the main room. Most of the pubs here in Edinburgh have a similar built-in contraption for accessing the keg storage under the floor. Sometimes when I see the bar maids go down in the basement to change the kegs around I remember that old house.

The red house in the front of the photo was our landlord-couple, Tage and Sonja’s, house. They were the nicest and most helpful couple you could ever imagine and Tage had a workshop right next to our green garage doors, which you can see in the photo, where he used to make really nice carved wooden butter knives.

We lived in that house for less than a year and after that, my mom met my step dad and we moved to Piteå where I lived until I eventually left the nest.

Thanks for the picture John!