Monday, July 10
Garden, 14:12
We woke up to the second hot day in a row and ate our breakfast outside for the second time this summer. After that I washed my hair in the sauna house and it actually felt pleasant. Sunshine raced out and disappeared somewhere on the farm.
We planted the rhubarb that we had brought from Helsinki and went to Camilla’s to dig up some plants that had spread too far for her liking. We planted them in our garden where, no doubt, they will spread too far for our liking.
After this we lay in the sun-loungers for the first time this summer. We can hear the woodpecker at work in one of the larger trees. I notice what it has done to the stump where I nailed a platform on which I put a sundial. In another summer or two it will have eaten through it. I don’t remember hearing the woodpecker in the garden in previous years. Irma points out that the wood might only have just become rotten enough to have insects living in its bark, and so the woodpecker may only just have become interested in us as customers.
Later I will sit on one of the old chairs and it will break under me. We will use this as a pretext to drive around the island. We will take the chair to the dump, visit Erika’s shop and Anne-Maj’s greenhouse. We will fill our water canisters from Benita’s.
In the early evening we will have our first barbecue of the year, as we set it up on the terrace and cook sausages. Eventually Sunshine will return home, although we will still have no sightings of the chicken.