Another flight, another COVID-test, and another quarantine. And yet one more COVID-test in the horizon, before I am free to spend time with family (and even get groceries). Thank goodness for my parents who pick up my grocery box. Thank goodness for this cute cottage. And thank goodness I finally got wifi last summer, ending the years of working from an iPhone hotspot.

Nothing in this cottage is minimalistic, but with furniture and kitchenware spanning a century in age, all is how it should be in a Finnish summer house: teacups from Russia and DDR, my great-grand uncle’s wife’s soup tureens, my father’s father’s furniture and my mother’s mother’s chair, and an Ikea kitchen.

(Loviisa, Finland; April 2021)