(journal entry from August 26, 2019)
After these adventures, we were all pretty hot and sweaty so we headed over to Erik’s house to meet his wife, Eila, and have Fika with them. We had apple juice (the best apple juice I’ve ever had) and nectarines.
Erik showed us some old photos that he has of the schoolhouse (he attended school in that same Röena schoolhouse… and so did his dad. In fact, Swen was Erik’s dad’s teacher for a few months before Swen lost his job.)
After Fika, we headed back out to see some more things that Erik wanted to show us. He loves history, especially the history of the Osby area. He and a few of his friends have taken it upon themselves to preserve some of the history and they have put together several little museums in the area. We went to a few of them and they were really interesting!
The first one that we went to was a schoolhouse museum. They had the room set up like a traditional schoolhouse, with time period desks, books, etc.
At the front of the room was an organ… a pump organ (you have to pump the peddle with your foot to keep it working so you can hear the sounds when you press the keys.) Erik was telling us that in every schoolhouse, there would have been an organ at the front of the classroom and the teacher would play hymns while the children sang.
I remember reading about this in the Swenson book, and also about how Swen, Thilda, and their children would often gather around this organ to sing while Swen played.
It made me happy that we have our piano in our school room. I want to make this part of the beginning of our school day as well. … I gotta learn some more songs. Luckily I do know how to play many of the simplified hymns.
Erik invited me to play this organ. … of course I played Come Thou Fount. 🙂 It was challenging to pump the peddle and play at the same time… felt like rubbing my tummy and patting my head at the same time. Haha.
After the schoolhouse museum, we went to another museum with a bunch of old Swedish things from the past couple hundred years. Then we went to the wagon museum and then a house/cabin from the 1700s and another house from the late 1700s.
After all the museums (well, we didn’t even go to half of the museums that Erik has), we went back to Erik’s house to have dinner with him and his wife.
By the time we were done with dinner, it was getting pretty late (almost 8:30 pm) so we said our goodbyes and drove to our Airbnb for tonight, which is just outside of Osby.
It was so nice of Erik to spend the entire day with us (10 hours) and show us so many neat things. 🙂
