Vipers and Cold Water

"When I was a little kid, there was an old storage house. I don’t know

I put "Swedish viper" into Wikipedia and
this is what I got!

which year the new one was built. They had hauled in a lot of sand when they cemented the foundation and the basement of this new storage house. There was a big pile of sand left over, and Lennart used to love to play there. One day he came in the kitchen and said to Mama that there was a big worm in the sandpile, and he stuck out his arm and measured on his arm how long the worm was. Mother looked sort of horrified and told us all to stay in the house. She ran out there, and it was a viper. The vipers didn’t often come in the yard, but that one had strayed.

A little further up in the yard there used to stand an old house. I don’t remember when it was taken down but I remember the house. It was there in the early 30s when Farbror Folke came home on furlough the first time. He had brought home a bunch of Mongolian hats, and there is a picture of us all lined up in front of that old house all wearing the Mongolian hats. Lennart isn’t with us in that picture so he must have been too little to be along with this. There

are pictures of us in an album somewhere and Folke i Sör is along with Brita, Sara, Margaretha and I. I look like the naughty one in the bunch. I have a hole in the middle of my apron. We always had to wear aprons. That protected our dresses some, so the dresses didn’t have to be washed so often.

Now if we go back to the old house, across the walkway there was an earth cellar. They made up a big pile of dirt and it was packed down and inside that cellar there were shelves to keep things in and it was amazing how cold it stayed in those cellars, but that cellar was taken down at the same time as the old house was taken down.

Lennart Boberg and, I believe, his oldest son Magnus,
walking on one of the paths at Kjettestorp in about 1964.

Before we go up to the barn, I’d like to take a little side trip to the brygghuset. That was a house at the southwest corner of the main house, down the hill, there on the outside of the brygghuset, there was a well. It was a big cement pipe and that was the most cold clear water from a natural spring. We carried it up to the house. Midi carried water. She had a yoke that fit across her shoulders, and there were chains at the ends and hooks on the end of the chains and there she could hang two buckets. It was easier to carry it that way than carry it in your arms or hands. They didn’t have regular wide-mouth buckets for that. They had some that were longer and narrower so the water didn’t splash out so easy. I always wanted to help. I begged to help carry water, so Midi fixed me up with two cream cans. They held about a gallon or two, and they had a lid on. So I could carry water when Midi carried water.

Then inside the brygghuset, there was cemented a tank. There was ice cold water from a natural spring there. This is where we hung our milk to keep it cold. There were bars across the tank to hang the milk cans from. In summertime, when we milked the cows in the evening, we put the milk down in that cold water to keep it fresh."