My Exotic Daily Life

Reader Contribution by Anneli Carter-Sundqvist
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Winter is a time for me to visit my family and friends in the north of Sweden where I grew up. A city in the 110,000 inhabitants range, the area hosts friends and siblings with degrees ranging from nurse to actor to teacher, with the same kind of lives I once had, too — before Maine, before Deer Isle, long before I’d even heard the word homesteading. Lives with careers and mortgages, lives where smart is a phone, sourdough bread a fashion and organic, locally grown produce increases your status on Facebook.

While many of those visiting our hostel are farmers and homesteaders themselves, some come from that “city culture” and seem to take their first hesitant steps outside of a flatly paved driveway when they arrive at our place. Wide eyes, a sense of adventure. I appreciate the interest shown in my life and in a more sustainable, conscientious way of living. That is, after all, why we open our home to hundreds of hostel guests every summer, to show that there are alternatives. What’s fascinating to me is the very fact that my daily life is fascinating.

“How big is this island again?” someone asked me. The answer — 3,000 inhabitants in winter and 6,000 in summer — usually seems, judging by the facial expression, to fall somewhere between deserted and slightly inhabited.

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