Livre d'Or

Lovely post, and I can empathise with home being a place that you *miss*; there are places I miss a lot, the physical feel and smell of them, that aren't really what I could legitimately call 'home', except that nothing can cure that sense of missing them like going there. But of course nostalgia is for times as well as places, and I love how you have painted the memories of times in Sweden that you miss as part of the place.

Somebody from the peninsula we used to live on posted an old photo on Facebook of the part of it that includes our house, taken circa 1989 (when quite possibly my family were 'in' the photo in some sense, inside the house or garden in the photo) and it struck such a chord in my heart the way that a photo of the same place taken now wouldn't do. To such an extent that I actually downloaded the photo and might print it out and put it up somewhere.

You know that passage in Wind in the Willows where Rat and Mole are walking home in the snow and Mole suddenly smells his mole hole and he pleads with Rat to go down into it because it's home, and then they are so pleased? I love that description.