Björkskog

The birch forest is not quiet. That's the first thing people get wrong. They come from the city expecting silence and find instead the sound of leaves against each other — a continuous papery conversation that changes pitch with the wind and never stops, not even at night, when you'd think the trees might give it a rest. I grew up at the edge of this forest in a house my great-grandmother built when houses were built by the people who would live in them. She was not a carpenter. You could tell. The kitchen floor slopes east and the back door has never closed properly in any season. In June the light is constant. Not bright exactly — a thin, persistent glow that doesn't understand darkness, that sits on the horizon at midnight like a guest who won't leave. The birches stand in it all night, white trunks lit from the side, and the forest looks like a room with too many columns and no roof. The mushroom season is September. Kantareller, which I know in English are chanterelles but which I refuse to call by their English name because the Swedish word tastes of the thing itself — golden, earthy, hidden under the birch litter. You find them by kneeling. There's no other way. Mushroom hunting is prayer, whether you mean it or not. My daughter walks behind me, bored in the way only a fourteen-year-old can be bored in a beautiful place. She carries the basket and checks her phone when she thinks I'm not looking. I'm always looking. The birches don't care about either of us. They shed their bark in scrolls and drop their leaves in October and stand through the winter like bones, and in spring the green comes back so fast you'd think they'd been holding their breath. Maybe they were. I've never been a tree. I don't know what they hold. I just walk through them and carry the basket when my daughter hands it back, which she always does when it gets heavy. That's the deal. She holds it when it's light. I hold it when it's full. We've never discussed this. Some arrangements don't need words.