Gardening

We're out in Trägårdsföreningen, the botanic gardens in the centre of town, having a walk. It's very sunny. It's also graduation week over here, when Swedish teenagers put on floppy sailor hats and get drunk all over everything. The park echoes to a vast open-sided bus, which is slowly orbiting the park out of sight and blasting out dance music.

Three months ago, this whole place was the colour of a dead labrador and had nothing on display but rotting weeds and leafless sticks in muddy ditches. Now its a marvellous profusion of tulips, pansies, roses and rhododendron blossoms. Elegant water features plash ornately in the centre of discreetly trellised pagodas, rather than the frozen lead pond linings of February.

Adding to this frenzy of colour are the rainbow ribbons of the West Pride festival tied to trunks and railings, the blond flags of hair the already-sunkissed Swedes are flashing as they jog about and the sky, polished antique wedgewood blue.

F has never seen summer. She likes it.

She's wearing sunglasses, little ones like swimming goggles. It's harder to tell where she's looking, but she keeps giving her 'uh!' of approval/excitement every time we turn a corner and see a new vista of fountains and flowerbeds. She grabs at leaves and petals if we pause to examine them, never hard enough to bruise or damage, just enough to see how they feel.

She starts asking to do this for new bushes quite quickly. She doesn't point, she hasn't worked that out at all yet, but she does lean with her body and head whilst doing rather inaccurate reaching. Generally I can tell when I'm moving her towards the right thing because she stops threshing and just waits for it to get in grabbing range.

Life seems very good, at this particular moment. It's almost a year since we moved to Sweden already. The first couple of months seem very far away, when everything was so strange and difficult. We had no money left and no income established yet. I spoke nothing beyond useless language course phrases (The Horse is Eating a Carrot!/Hästen äter en morot!), V was going through the peculiar and, for her, tough rigours of pregnancy.

And look at us now, swanning about in the sun with our lovely daughter! Pity I'm not that far beyond the carrot-eating horse, but you can't have it all.