Nearly due west of Stockholm is a lake. It's quite a large lake, and it meanders and winds its way through the Swedish countryside like an amoeba, dispersing its mass over the flat lands with only the highest points of land rising up above the water level. One of the largest of these islands is the township of Ekero, which seems to be a pleasant, rustic and simple community. It's an easy trip to the city, the locals are friendly, and the general store has very limited weekend hours - basically a nice place. But tucked away on this island, not far off the main road and up a shaded woodsy driveway is the Rosenhill Tradgard, Cafe, och Musteri - a farm, cafe and apple juice pressing business all rolled into one delirious, and many say magical little alcove.
Rosenhill, the place that I've called my new home for the last two and a half weeks, looks a bit like Pee Wee's Playhouse might look if it were redesigned by aging hippie farmers who inherited an ancient farm and turned it into a wholesome organic retreat center - which is basically what it is. Cafe decorations include archaic farming equipment hanging from the walls and ceiling, a model human skull who always has a pair of fresh crab-apples resting in its eye sockets, ashtrays which look like the title character in The Old Man and the Sea, and a wide variety of coffee mugs from every background, from Swedish driving schools, to Marlboro, to one of my favorites which ambiguously just has a "dinners" logo on it. Most of the furniture is and looks handmade, much of the produce sold and cooked with in the cafe comes straight from the gardens, and except for the professional kitchen staff and the family who runs the place, just about everyone working here is a WWOOFer, like myself.
It didn't take long after arriving for Amanda, Matt, and myself to fall in love with the place. Actually, it really didn't even take more than a minute from walking up the front driveway. There is a cozy, home-made summer camp feel to the place, which despite never really having enjoyed summer camp, I quite liked. We took a flight from Ireland to Stockholm after having a fantastic final few Irish days in Dublin, and after a full day of travelling, we arrived at Rosenhill just in time to hear the dinner bell ringing across the fields. This turned out to be fortuitous timing, since we got to meet everyone altogether, and eat a fantastic meal of cafe leftovers all at once. Every inch of the place seemed to be drenched in simple happiness. The WWOOFers and everyone else were all smiling and joking, eager to tell us newbies just what a wonderful place we've picked for ourselves to live and work for the next...how long?...three months??...wow, you guys are lucky! Most volunteers only tend to stay a couple weeks but wish they could stay longer, or only intend to stay a couple weeks and end up putting off their departure for a day, or two, or a week, or two...
This ain't no easygoing laissez-faire hippie commune though. It could be, and we'd all be pretty happy, but we came here to work, to do something useful, and that makes us even happier, to get stuff done. Morning tasks generally have to do with cleaning the cafe and bathroom areas before we open for business. I've lucked out lately by getting animal-feeding duty - taking the leftover scraps from yesterday's food and feeding some to the chickens and ducks in their pen, and the three pigs in theirs. Nothing puts a smile on my face at 9:30 am like watching a medium-sized hen snatching up and entire foot-long hot dog and greedily running around the coop with it, trying to keep the ridiculously-sized prize for herself, or tossing a bucket of slop food into the pigpen and listening to the grunts, snorts and wheezes of three pigs going nose-deep into their meals, chowing down on every possible morsel. After morning routines, the daily jobs tend to involve weeding, planting or otherwise tending the gardens, bussing tables and dishwashing in the cafe, running the apple-press now that the apples are in season and it seems like half the households in the region have an orchard they want to drink, and other assorted maintenance tasks. Lars and Emilia seem to encourage us to find a project we like and stick to that as long as there aren't more pressing jobs at hand. Amanda's been painting the family's house, my new friend Steve's been building a solar panel, which while very powerful, is still an appreciated effort and a good model, and I've been mastering my tractor skills. Okay, mastering is probably the wrong word, since as good as I might be becoming at driving the thing, I'm pretty sure the lawn-cutter attachment I've been using it with is either haunted or just hates me. All three times I've taken it out for a spin, something has broken, so that just doing a two hour job of cutting the overgrown grassy areas has been taking me about 4 days, with most of the time spent trying to fix the beast.
But when I get too frustrated or tired from labor, and after dinner, after our nightly movies or hanging out is over, I can retire to the second most interesting house I've ever lived in - my converted Volvo city bus-turned-trailer (the most interesting being my Malian mud hut). The bus still has a ticket insertion slot and other commuter-bus standard gear, but has also been outfitted with beds, a non-working sink, a non-working fridge, non-working lights, and a set of keys which are still in the ignition but, expectedly, don't work. It does however offer a lovely easterly view of our far-northern 4:30 am sunrise, which wakes me up every morning like clockwork, and gives me the chance to look outside at the view, look at my watch, and be happy that I still get another 3 and a half hours to sleep before wakeup call. What a great invention!
Of all the things there are to love about Rosenhill, perhaps the best, the true source of magic here, is the people. There are the WWOOFers, who more or less stumbled upon this place much the way my little group did, just looking for a cool experience, and it takes a certain kind of generally interesting, adventurous, and open-minded person to want to do something like this in the first place. There are also the employees who, as some of them have told me, came here once, decided it was their favorite place in the world, and decided to get a job so they could come back every day. There are the owners, Lars and Emilia, who do a good job of making sure that we know that we are expected to work, but do everything they can to make sure that we enjoy it as much as we can. And there are the locals who come out to the cafe and to the concert/parties every Saturday night. After the relative seclusion and limited interaction with others that we had in Ireland, where Amanda, Matt, our host Flo, and I mostly just had ourselves for company outside of work, it was a godsend to arrive here to not just other WWOOFers - five to ten others at a time - but also an endless stream of local visitors and some regulars who, as would be expected at a place like this, are as friendly as can be. If you haven't gotten the point of this update yet, it's that Rosenhill might well be one of the happiest places on Earth, and I am one lucky S.O.B.
