Midsummer, Again

The maypole fell over at 2 PM, which was early. Last year it had lasted until four. The year before, a personal best, it had survived until the dancing started, which meant it fell over during the dancing, which was worse because it fell on someone, specifically on Uncle Bengt, who had been standing too close because Uncle Bengt always stood too close to things and had a relationship with spatial awareness that could only be described as theoretical. Uncle Bengt was fine. The maypole was not. This year, Linnea's father had reinforced the base. He had dug a deeper hole, added gravel, braced it with two-by-fours, and secured the whole thing with a method he called "engineering" and which everyone else called "too many ropes." The maypole stood in the garden like a prisoner. It was decorated with birch leaves and wildflowers and the small Swedish flags that appear in June as reliably as mosquitoes and with approximately the same level of invitation. It fell over anyway. A gust from the lake. The ropes held. The base held. The pole itself snapped, about a metre up, at a point that Linnea's father examined afterward with the focus of a man who has been personally insulted by wood. "Rotten," he said. "You checked for rot," Linnea's mother said. "Not there. Higher up. The rot was structural." "As opposed to decorative rot?" Her father did not dignify this. He went to the shed. He came back with a shorter pole, which he erected in twenty minutes with no ropes and no engineering, just a hole and a mallet and the determination of a man who will have a midsummer celebration if it kills him and possibly even if it kills Uncle Bengt. The shorter maypole looked, in Linnea's opinion, like a maypole that had been told bad news. But it stood. The birch leaves were rehung. The flowers were redistributed. The small flags were reattached by Linnea's niece, Saga, who was six and who approached flag placement with a seriousness that Linnea found both admirable and slightly alarming. They danced. This is what you did at midsummer. You danced around the maypole and sang songs about frogs, for reasons that no one alive could fully explain but that everyone accepted in the way that Swedes accept many things: silently, with an expression that suggests mild confusion is a national characteristic and not a personal failing. The frog song required you to hop. Linnea's aunt Margareta hopped. She was seventy-three. She hopped with the grim resolve of a woman who would not be the first to stop, even though her knees had been suggesting she stop since approximately 2014. Uncle Bengt, standing at what he considered a safe distance, watched her hop and said nothing, which was the most supportive thing Uncle Bengt had done in years. Afternoon turned into evening, which in June in Sweden meant the light changed from bright to slightly less bright and then stayed there, refusing to become dark, hovering in a state of permanent almost-dusk that foreigners found charming for about two days and then found maddening. Linnea sat on the dock with her cousin Erik. The lake was still. A loon called from somewhere on the water, the sound carrying the way sounds do over lakes at midsummer — clearly, and too far, as though the air itself had thinned. "Same as last year," Erik said. "The pole fell over." "Same as last year." "Last year it fell on Uncle Bengt." "Exactly the same as last year, then, but with slightly less drama." They drank beer. The light did not change. On the lawn behind them, someone had started the grill, and the smell of charcoal and sausages mixed with the smell of birch and lake water and the particular sweetness of the wildflowers on the truncated maypole, which stood in the garden, short and dignified, holding its flags. Linnea's father sat in a folding chair near the maypole, watching it as though it might try something. He had a beer. He was not relaxed. He would not be relaxed until the maypole was dismantled, stored, and the hole filled in. This would happen in three days. Until then, he was on watch. "Next year," he said to no one in particular, "I'm using metal." He would not use metal. He would use wood. The wood would have a flaw. The maypole would fall. Uncle Bengt would stand too close. Aunt Margareta would hop. The frog song would make no sense. The light would not go down. Same as last year. Same as every year. Linnea finished her beer and went back to the lawn, where the dancing had started again around the shorter pole, and joined in, because that was what you did, and because the frogs were not going to sing themselves.