Arctic Stories #7. How Kids Spend Summers in the Arctic

Good morning, my dear readers! As summer kicks off in the Arctic, let me share how we used to spend summers as kids. Yes, summer starts on June 1st in my home city, and on June 21st in Belgium, I never understood why :).

As I wrote before, my parents built a 'dacha' house in the countryside. Lots of people have these. School year finishes on May 31st, and vacations last until August 31st. That gives kids 3 months of free time and their parents 3 months to entertain them :). My parents took me to spend summers in our dacha house. We literally lived there for 3 months. And if one of them had to go to work in the city, it wasn't too far away.

Such concept of summers created 2 groups of friends:

• school ones that we studied with and spent autumns, winters and springs together,
• dacha ones that we spent summers together outside.

So what did we do with my dacha friends?

1.Learn how to grow vegetables and berries, help our parents/grandparents plant and harvest and eat kilos of them in the process. I still remember evenings when we had 10 kilos of strawberries or raspberries and we would eat them one plate after another. Such amount of berries would cost unimaginable amounts in the city. They do now too in the supermarkets in Belgium. But in the Arctic they were free of charge for us yet priceless because of hours of work we put into them. And so much more delicious than the store ones.

2. Learn how to swim in a cold forest river, a really-really cold one! Swimming would be allowed after 3 thunderstorms. Then we knew that water was warm enough. Well, relatively warm at 16C. That usually happened closer to July. And swimming season would stop from the second week of August. Seaweed would grow too high by then and it would become dangerous. That gave us several weeks in July where we hoped the weather would be above 20C. And when it was, we all went to the swimming location at the river and played there. The river was sandy and shallow at first, so we could practice as much as we wanted to. Then it quickly became very deep. My dad tried to reach the bottom of it, but he couldn't. Then there was a little island in the middle again where you could stand. All in all, it was maybe 10 meters wide. But believe me, getting in 16C water was a challenge. My dad was the bravest one, he just ran into it and swam to the other side.

3. Play made-up games. We could go for a picnic to the nearby hill. Or flatten coins at the railways when the trains came by. Or create quests for ourselves to pass with tasks like getting over a very big field, climbing over the fence, hiding behind the cellars or doing strange mathematical equations.

4. Practise entrepreneurship. One summer we went around selling newspapers. Another one we made jewelry from beads and displayed it at the dacha harvest exhibition. Yet another summer we were really into small pretty stones. We gathered them everywhere, washed them and sold them to each other for 1-5 cents.

5. Taste local delicacies. For example, birch juice. It took days to gather it from the tree, but it was so good!

Or eat cranberries and cloudberries. These only grow on swamps, and you need to know where to go to and how to gather them. My dad knew that. And they were fantastically sour and fresh. This is how cloudberries look like:

6. Meet and play with dacha boys. We rode bicycles together and chatted our evenings away.

How did you spend your summers all around the world?

Up next, winter fun in the Arctic! In the meantime, please, restore our beautiful planet in any way you can.

With love, Elena Doms