Lovely meditation by a friend on holiday in Sweden.

This morning I woke at four in the morning to hear cranes calling out from the Swedish lake. This is where we come every summer. Some holidays are about discovering new places, the shock of the strange; here, we know every stick and stone and each year repeat what we did the year before, until time loses its boundaries and memories are a haze. The familiar pleasures include the long slow dawn and dusk; the swallows in the eaves, the wind on the lake, the chantarelles in the forest, yellow and fluted and smelling of apricots, and the wild strawberries outside the house whose mineral sweetness is the taste of a Swedish summer.