A wonderful new word I discovered on this trip to Sweden: smultronställe. The literal meaning is “wild strawberry patch”, but the word is used to mean a special place that is close to your heart, that isn’t so easy for others to find, where you feel at ease and at one with the world.
Your personal smultronställe may be a quirky café, a woodland glade or a place with a fine view, far from the madding crowd. (Examples taken from the Wikipedia article.)
Ingmar Bergman made a critically acclaimed film called smultronstället (Wild Strawberries), in which the elderly protagonist dreams of fondly remembered scenes of his youth.
Lots of berries and fruit end in -on in Swedish: hallon, smultron, plommon, nypon, hjortron, lingon, päron, and on and on…
Our home in Sweden for these two weeks is in Plommongatan (Plum Street) and all the neighbouring streets are named on a similarly fruity theme: Rose-hip Street, Bearberry Street, Raspberry Street, etc.
So what about you, do you have a smultronställe where you can escape the demands of the world?
awordfromjapan 