Where I grew up in Monterey, California, one birch tree grew tall (and still grows), maybe 40-feet+ and billowy in the soil close to the house front door. Another had been planted in the backyard. The leaves look like pointy bulbous heart shapes, softer green hues, the size of an American dollar coin. Any gust of wind organizes the leaves, gathering them like petite synchronized swimmers, a performance in the country creek where water flows, the gentle splash a surround sound.

Born in 1965, I spent much of my growing up years in this home after the age of six. And now on this June 2022 chilly summer morning I am 57, a few decades beyond the first birch tree listenings, and I can hear them again from where I sit on the wide porch outside. Growing in a long linear grove that defines the property line for her country house, my Mom’s home-home, in Liatorp (several miles from where she grew up in Tving, a tiny village in Sweden’s Blekinge southern region) these are similar birch trees, different location, that comprise a forest. Counting them I can see ten trees (maybe more? I am ageing) each a few hundred feet high. Tightly together they continue to grow up so close, the birch trees. When the wind rustles their leaves, the sound happens in that concert-like effort, each tree a member in the rural country orchestra adding a signature sound, each one does.

My 11-year-old son and I are staying with his Mormor (grandmother) for one Swedish summer month. Through binoculars called hindsight, I can see, Marta (aka Mom) traveling, one immigrant from Stockholm, 22 years old, to Princeton, New Jersey to secure work as a full-time au pair. She meets the Princeton Political Science student, my father Stephan, and then made her life in Monterey for many and most of the decades in her adult life. The woman raised on a Swedish farm and the man raised to attend an Ivy League paired to bring my older brother, myself, and younger brother to life’s forest, the adventures in there.

From her 50s on, Marta traveled home every year to Sweden, spending several months mired in her family roots, as one daughter in the mix of 15 children her parents brought into the world, to hear the birch trees, their calling, not hers for many decades while living in the United States, yet across time like a woman’s sturdy skirt cloth swishing against sometimes confident, sometimes wobbly knees and legs, sashaying forward as she did. Later, she mostly wore pants—of the house, if gentle honesty reigns.

For more summer sounds on this day, on Sweden’s national day June 6 we stepped inside a stone church built in the 1600s to listen more. We opened the tall heavy wood church door, bright sunshine on our backs at 6 p.m. since daylight might disappear around 11 p.m. so far north of the equator is this summer clock. The pews are fully lined with around 100 silver-haired seniors efficiently seated. I stare at the back of all these Swedish folks then excuse my way into one pew’s corner zone a few feet away from the only other family of color besides mine—as in my mixed race African American and Caucasian son and me. In crowds, my son can select his seat on his own time as he does now, which has become family ritual. As hummingbirds do, he organizes his energy very well. The female director of the choir had placed him on the cushiest seat in a cozy alcove for best listening.

Next followed an hour of acapella-talented choir music. Wearing tuxedos with red bow ties, 35 gentlemen bellowed beyond birch tree humming and more on the unpredictable octaves of country birds—low, loud, spritely, dark and yet all in sync—all in Swedish except for two songs. When the aural focus is on a foreign language not understood, then these ears search for more familiar pings. During this performance I retrained my ears to follow piano notes played by the female conductor, just a few piano strikes as in plink-plink-plink to signal the right sound key before a song. Guessing I am. Music forte is not one I have other than simple enjoying. And when the female conductor joined the choir for one song only, her voice arrived demure as hints of operatic volume stayed still, controlling that power.

In an hour and a half of Swedish songs, two were sung in English. One portly grandpa read an introduction to each song and for these two I could detect several English words: negro spiritual and the rose. Awkward words are negro spiritual spoken in that classic Swedish sing-song accent (so similar to the Muppet’s Swedish chef). When the choir belts out “Nobody Knows the Troubles I Have Seen” in restrained volumes and energy I afforded myself the inside cozy-laugh that the universe sometimes gifts (even more often as I age). This nerdy butch lesbian sits comfortable in a church pew as an all-white male choir sings a spiritual hymn that in history bonded African American southern slaves as method to endure yet further, the soulful pitch that choir sang in, and now rendered this way and watched by my mixed-race male son. Cacophonous soundings in many octaves of perspective.

Yet when the gangly tall grandpa stepped from behind several rows of his choir comrades to sing Janis Joplin’s “The Rose” in English, the church went pin-drop quiet. During the lyrics I took the bird’s eye view, perched high to see the wider elements: “And you think that love is only/For the lucky and the strong/Just remember in the winter/Far beneath the bitter snows/Lies the seed that with the sun's love/
In the spring becomes the rose.” All life has seasons that exude or hibernate thriving life, so we listen which time this one is.

And this healthy day had brought so many songs of adoration—not the sappy Hollywood version—but those well-earned skills to stay quiet for hearing so much love happening all around—birch trees swaying, grandmas ageing, youth growing tall, middle agers gratituding, white male choir singing, family history delving, creeks flowing, and cemetery learning.

This summer 2022 vacation we three bring diverse points of views. One 5th grader, one middle-ager, and one octogenarian. As we experience the same event, our comments tend to vary—how could they not? In that Fridlevstad church where the choir sang is a cemetery as so many churches design. One tombstone appears chunked or sculpted from an ancient boulder, maybe one piece from those emerging whole and visible everywhere on acres of farmland, nature remnants deposited thousands and millions of icy years ago, thawed and forever present in this brief modern human epoch. The gravestone my son and I stand before tells the 1705 story, how one Swedish countrysider died then. My 11-year-old discovered this tombstone and gawked some at the stretch of time before him. In Sweden, even rocks sound historical hints to decode.

After the choir ended, on the drive back to the porched house where I listened to birch trees early-early that morning, we enjoyed laughter in the car. As serendipity goes, the 11-year-old in our family enjoyed listening to the old geezers crooning—at least my guess stays here since he was kind of beaming and giddy in the car. My unwitting “plan” was in flow, the state of impromptu that is what we mostly label “parenting.” Wedging open the creaky door to Mormor’s house, we joined her around the fire, crackling away, happy noise to usher out the day as we all murmured randomly, idle chattering to sound off sweetly that this country day was complete.