Really enjoying Midsummer, or…

Tjorven on her way to the midsummer celebrations in the Stockholm archipelago enthusiastically to her mum and dad:

“I want to be neat like this - always!!!”

Her mother has her doubts, and says (rather mutters) she hopes Tjorven will stay that neat the whole Midsummer Eve!

And Pelle on HIS way to the celebrations to his dad Melker and big-sister Malin:

“Does one HAVE to have such repulsive clothes when it is midsummer?? One has to look up for everything that is fun!”

”How NEAT you are!!!”

Tjorven says to Pelle very admiringly when they meet.

”Oh yes,”

Pelle replies not sounding very happy (another one muttering here, yes, he too mutters, as Tjorven's mum above) with very mixed feelings, not enthusiastically at all.

On a rock-face Malin’s other two brothers suddenly see someone coming with the boat to Seacrow Island/Saltkråkan, Krister an admirer of their sister Malin. THEIR Midsummer Eve is spoiled, because now they have to protect Malin against this Krister! And they get a really tough work, a work which their two best friends, two girls Teddy and Freddy (yes, they are girls!!) help them the best they can with!! I can reveal they succeed in their deeds, and Malin isn’t too sad about it in the end to be honest!

But look what happens with Tjorven and Pelle – they really enjoy things!!! With those clothes one can at least bath ones feet, can’t one?? Competing how deep they dare to walk…

“Oh, I got wet!!!”

Tjorven said suddenly.

“I am not!!”

Pelle says (triumphantly?).
Tjorven can’t help… No, I won’t reveal more, you have to look!

“We couldn’t help it!!”

Tjorven said to Malin.

“COULDN'T HELP IT!!??”

Malin replied, trying to hide her smile behind sounding angry. This clip is from 1964!!

Here other people enjoying Midsummer??

Små grodorna (small frogs)…

The Crying Olles song...

And when the children have gone to bed…

About "Seacrow Island" by Astrid Lindgren.

If you go down to the quay in Stockholm on a summer's morning and see a little white boat called Seacrow I lying there, that is the right boat to take and all you have to do is to go on board. For at ten o'clock precisely she will ring her bell for departure and back out from the quay. She is now setting out on her usual trip, which ends at the island that lies the farthest out in the sea of all the islands in the Stockholm archipelago.

Seacrow I is a purposeful, energetic little steamer and she has made this journey three times a week in summer and once a week in winter for more than thirty years, although she is probably quite unconscious of the fact that she ploughs through waters different from any others on the face of the earth. She crosses wide expanses of open water, steams through narrow channels, past hundreds of green islands and thousands of grey, bare rocks. She does not go fast and the sun is low when at last she reaches the quay at Seacrow Island, the island which has given her its name. She has no need to go any farther, for there is only the open sea beyond with its bare rocks and its islands where nobody lives except eider ducks, seagulls, and other sea birds.

But there are people on Seacrow Island. Not many, at most twenty-that is, in the winter. But in the summer there are the summer visitors as well. Just such a family of summer visitors was aboard Seacrow I one day in June a few years ago. It consisted of a father and his four children, and their surname was Melkerson. They lived in Stockholm and none of them had been to Seacrow Island before. And so they were very excited, especially Melker, the father.

"Seacrow Island,"

he said.

'I like the name. That was why I took the house!'

Malin, his nineteen-year-old daughter, looked at him and shook her head. What a scatter-brained father she had! He was almost fifty but he was as impulsive as a child and more boyish and irresponsible than his own sons. Now he was standing there as excited as any child on Christmas Eve, expecting them all to be wildly enthusiastic about his idea of taking a summer cottage on Seacrow Island.

'It's like you, Daddy, "

said Malin,

"it's exactly like you to go and take a cottage on an island which you have never even seen, just because you like the name."

"That's what I should have thought everybody did,"

Melker defended himself. He thought for a moment and then said,

"Or perhaps one has to be an author and be more or less crazy to do a thing like that. Only a name - Seacrow Island! Perhaps other people would have gone and looked at the place before taking it."

"Lots would have done - but not you!”

"Well, never mind, I'm on my way there now,"

said Melker cheerfully.

“I'm going to look at it now!"

And he gazed round him with his gay, blue eyes. He saw all the things he loved most: those pale waters, those islands and skerries, those old grey rocks, the shore with its old houses and jetties and boat-houses-he felt as if he wanted to stretch out his hand and caress them. Instead, he grasped Johan and Niklas by the nape of the neck. "Do you realize how beautiful it all is? Do you realize how lucky you are to be going to live in the midst of all this for a whole summer?"

Johan and Niklas said that they did realize it and Pelle said he realized it too.

"Well, why don't you shout for joy then?"

said Melker.

"Would you mind my asking for a spot of jubilation?"

"How do you do it?”

Pelle asked. He was only seven years old and could not show joy to order.

"You yodel,"

said Melker, and laughed.

Pictures from today here and here.