Kjettestorp's backyard

This is the backyard at Kjettestorp, taken Midsommar 1990.
I'm guessing that the little red house in the backyard is
Hansekammaren. The children playing, left to right, are
Amanda Manuszak, CarlHenrik Sturve, Malin Andersson
(or Maria?) and Jonas Bäck.

"Now maybe we should go outside and look at the buildings outside. On the west side of the house in the yard, there was a little house that we called Hansekammaren or Hanse for short. Why it was called that I’ve never found out. Somebody thought that long ago a man must have lived there who was called Hanse. One room there was Dad’s workshop. Dad was a real fanatic for keeping things in order. On the walls, there were nails, and there hung hammers and saws and wrenches in order by size. I have to tell you one thing right here too. When I came to America and was over here the first time to visit Bill and his mother, I went with Bill out to the workshop and there, on the wall, hung hammers and wrenches in rows on nails just like in Dad’s workshop. I liked what I saw. When Bobergs first moved into Kjettestorp, Farfar’s parents lived in Hanse. I think their names were Carl Johan Johansson and Sofia Samuelsdotter. I have no memory of them myself. They had a bed and a table, I suppose, and there was an open fireplace that burnt wood and I imagine Ragnar carried in their wood. Mama and Midi cooked for them though and took care of them. There was also an attic in Hanse, and when I was grown, in that attic, we found copper coffee pots. I have one of them where one leg is a little burned down. I suppose that was the leg they had in towards the coals when they cooked their coffee.

This is the three-legged copper pot with one shorter leg.
It sits in my kitchen :)

Right at the end of Hanse, were the outhouses.  First there was one room with two holes, and it had a window up above the door. Then there was another room with two holes and one little hole for the kids. There were two or three steps up to make it easy for us. That had a window on the north side, but it was so low down that any grown-up could have looked in, so it was always covered with a white lace curtain. The floors in both rooms were covered with rag rugs in pretty colors, and in the corner, there was a wooden barrel, and in this barrel, there were newspapers and catalogues. We had Åhlen och Holm. It was one of the first mail order

companies in Sweden.  Then they would cut juniper bushes and stick behind those barrels. That was the air freshener in those days. Juniper bushes smell good and exude that wood fragrance a long time.  Outside both doors, there was one long step made of wood and in front of each door, they spread out fir branches in a half-circle pattern. That was so you could wipe your feet.

You didn’t even go into the outhouse with dirty feet.  Those branches were changed every Saturday. Also, every Saturday, they scrubbed the seats and the lids and the floors with hot water and green soap. That green soap itself had a woodsy fresh smell.  I don’t know exactly what it was made of but it had pitch in it from fir or some other tree. It was a strong cleaning agent. That soap went for everything from washing your hair to scrubbing the floors.

Then on the other side of the road down to the schoolhouse, there was the woodshed when I was little. They hauled logs into the woodhouse that they were going to cut. They had sawhorses and sawed the logs up into special lengths which later could be cut with an ax on the chopping block. Dad didn’t always have time to do all of these things, so they used to hire a guy who came from Misterfall who came and chopped wood. I remember him as the first person I saw chew tobacco and thought it looked so yucky. A little further over towards hagen or the meadow, there was another building and that was fårhuset, the sheep house. We never had a lot of sheep, maybe as many as 20. Sheep were good at grazing. They could even graze where horses had already gone. Sheep are sort of like goats; they find things to nibble on. They can even eat aspen. They used to cut aspen branches and tie them in bundles and let them dry. They would feed these to the sheep in wintertime along with hay and other things."