I
Every year hundreds of thousands of Finns travel into the deep forests, to return to the lost time, when water closets and showers hadn’t yet been invented, humans lived by hunting and foraging, to the time, when people of the north survived through the winter by piling hot stones in the middle of their tents, to the time, when human revealed its deepest emotions only by shouting to the forest, and forest replied to the human with birdsong, while the Pole Star glowed its northern lights.
The Cabin
is the pinpoint of the Finnish middle class dream, a World Heritage Site, the beloved and dreaded guest of death estates, which oozes freedom and primitive vitality, as well as aristocratic drowsing and dramatic turns of events. The Finnish Cabin can unify families into close-knit communities, but it has also the capability to divide them into tiny, bitter pieces.
The Cabin
can be an architectural artwork with glass walls or a hundred-year-old log shack, but nevertheless it's The Cabin, that one carries and repairs with a subtle combination of ostensible modesty and unreserved pride. However, not even the most expensive and modern Finnish secondary residence is called “a country house” or “a villa”, as they would say in Central Europe.
It's The Cabin.
II
We left to be healed and unwinded by the nature, to the cabin. We took only the bare necessities from the city:
clothes for the heat wave, spare clothes, windbreakers, swimsuits, bed sheets, towels, sun lotion, sunglasses, hats, board games, books, new potatoes, smoked salmon, herring, dill, butter, fruits and vegetables, sausages, steaks, breakfast and late-night snacks, coffee and tea, low-effort nibbles, candy, biscuits, dressings, oil, spices, beer, wines, long drinks, ciders, bubble water, laptops, chargers, bluetooth speaker, headphones, shampoos, conditioners, shavers, lotions, deodorants, toilet paper, kitchen paper, tooth paste, tooth brushes and a water containers.
Indeed, we took only the bare necessities
and left behind us the one we wanted to forget.