Lakes, woods, mosses, rocks, and usually real silence. Hearing a leaf falling, a bird singing, a bumblebee on a flower. Often, it’s the small things in this vast country. Tiny delicate flowers, countless, in an endless landscape.

Sometimes the wind around your ears, the call of a nocturnal bird, the barking of a deer. And occasionally, if you’re unlucky, a neighbor in the distance who replenishes his wood supply for winter with a chainsaw.

The murmuring of water against the shores of one of the many, many lakes. Or the drifting and sometimes even the banging of the ice. And if you’re lucky, the tinkling chimes of small ice floes clinking against a bank. Natural ice sculptures on overhanging branches.

The ice crystals in all the colors of the rainbow with the low sun shining on the snow. Forest paths with pristine snow where no human has walked, only the tracks of a hare, a deer, or sometimes a moose.

The first loud calls of the cranes returning in early spring, being the most beautiful harbinger of spring.

A few deer running across a truly Swedish meadow, full of stones, grasses, and plants, disappearing behind a wall of stones stacked long ago, and becoming invisible again.

The rare shock of suddenly encountering a moose on the road and a second later, the delight. If you’re at least still alive…

A summer walk amidst as many wild raspberries as you can eat. The late summer with all those blueberries. Autumn with an infinite amount of edible mushrooms. Mosses of all kinds, green, gray, red. Beard mosses hanging from the branches of trees covered with lichens. Yes, clean air.

And then again, that silence and that peace. No need to do something, nothing to be done, except to clean and prepare all those mushrooms.

Sweden does something to you, nature, the air, the landscape. You can’t escape it.