When we moved to Sweden, we ended up in Nässjö — a small town nestled in the highlands of Småland. It was beautiful country: rolling hills, mirror-still lakes, forests that stretched further than you’d ever want to walk. In summer I was out fishing every week, and in winter skiing was a main occupation.

Then we moved to Malmö, a big city on flat ground, close to the sea.

The first day we came to Malmö I took my fishing gear, hopped on my bicycle, and searched for a fishing place. I asked people where the coast was. They looked at me as if I was from another planet and said that they didn’t know. After I while I changed the question and ask where the harbor was. That they could point out, and I ended up on a thick concrete quay with warehouses, large cranes and cargo ships. Steel, concrete, bricks and water. No nature in sight. I turned around and cycled back. I spent the whole day cycling and came home hungry and freezing.

Malmö was a disappointment. No snow worth speaking of, no wild lakes, just city parks with trimmed hedges and joggers. I missed the open water and the silence of the woods. So when my finances began to improve and my first real job gave me some footing, I started looking for a summer cottage.

Every weekend I drove north from Malmö, hunting for something that matched my memories of Nässjö. The places closer to the city were out of reach — too expensive. But 140 kilometres north, right at the border where Skåne becomes Småland, I found it. A wooden cottage built in 1970, sitting twenty metres from the edge of a lake, with 2,200 square metres plot and old trees leaning over the water.

My wife and I spent every weekend there. We walked, we cooked, we read. And I fished — even in the rain. The lake was full of fish; roach, perch and pike. The perch could be big as 1 kg and the pike could be anywhere from 1 kg to 20 kg. Fishing a calm lake is more relaxing than meditation. The stillness gets into you. That is why I loved it as much as I did.

On one side of the cottage the lake; on the other, untouched forest. In summer and autumn my wife and I take long hikes through the trees, filling our baskets with chanterelles and porcini. The ground is thick with raspberries, blueberries, and lingonberries. You hear cuckoos and woodpeckers, Canada geese passing overhead, and other birds whose names I never learned. Every year the cranes and herons return. And at early morning or late afternoon, if you are quiet enough, you catch the lonely call of a loon drifting across the water — a sound that makes the world feel very large and very still.

When we retired, we gave our apartment in Malmö to our son and moved to the cottage for good.