I was bored one afternoon recently, so I decided to go online and see if I could find pictures of various places where I spent time earlier in my life. I found a lot, which will of course be more fascinating to me than to you, but I still want to share.
Here are a few that I found:
Enskedefield elementary school where I started my education in the fall of 1947. I was seven years old. In those days it was called a folkskola, where most or all children went for their first four years of school. After that, a child had the option to transfer to a school that would lay the groundwork to higher levels of education, sort of like the American middle and high school.
All this is of course now changed and I have no idea how the present school system works in Sweden.
Sadly, mean spirited little boys also attended this school. Since I was taller, certainly much taller than they, I was bullied a lot.
When I was eligible to transfer to middle and high school, I told my parents I wanted to go to a school for girls only. Fortunately, they still had them back then.
This is the street where I grew up. I'm amazed at how narrow it was, as it was built before everyone had a car. It was a lovely street to live on as a child. Our neighborhood was fabulous too, built on the grounds of a former estate, Enskede Gard, we lived on a street called Cabbagepatch Road. No wonder everything grew so well in our garden.
This is the school I transferred to in 1951.
This is during a break at my school. I enjoyed studying and I was good at all subjects, except math, as it became more advanced.
This is the rear of our house, no pictures were available of the garden. We had a large yard in the back where my parents planted just about everything. We first moved there in 1944. Times were tough then, food was rationed, and war raged outside our borders.
Looking back and understanding now the work involved in planning and planting that garden, I so wish I hadn't taken it for granted. I wish I had thanked or complimented my parents for their huge effort.
Our garden had everything: Winter and summer apples, plums and pears. Bushes of red and black berries, gooseberries, and raspberries, which grew the length of the garden. Of course, there were potatoes and other root veggies and flowers too. All kinds of perennials, maybe not so many annuals. A forsythia bush grew large at the corner of our house and I had a plum tree outside my bedroom window.
The manor house of the estate stood in its beautiful park. It is still there. A few of the farm buildings were converted to a riding school with stables and an indoor arena.
As a young girl, of course I was in love with horses. I took riding lessons and had my first volunteer job there, grooming horses and mucking out their stalls.
The riding school is still there and is now the largest in the Stockholm area.
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You aren't off the hook yet, I plan to continue to share my life via photos I find online. It was just too much fun for me to stop now.
