The summer house

Asked what Estonians do at their summer houses, I was told they basically chop firewood. There’s more to it, of course: having a sauna, picking berries or mushrooms when in season, making home-brewed beer or fruit wine, or otherwise enjoying life. Sounds fine by me. We enjoyed a suvila experience several times during our stay in Estonia. In every case, the time flew by for us, when you’d think in such places it stands still.

For Valdur Mikita, the suvila is the Estonians’ laboratory for living their culture, at the edge of nature and the theatre of human action. “Estonian country houses are a sort of reservoir of magical consciousness,” he writes in The Linguistic Forest (2013).

“An Estonian’s way of thinking might look like the following: create a place for yourself to spend time over many years; invite wise people to visit; and wander in the forest, sing, take a sauna, and do everything that promotes peripheral consciousness.”

Of course, summer houses are not just an Estonian thing. Many New Zealanders have a bach or crib to head to in the weekends or for the holidays, especially with family. They are usually near a beach or lake, and their construction was usually such that you wouldn’t look closely at the Building Code. My own suvila has the bach or “tiny house” concept in mind, as well as a desire to build something, and, perhaps, lurking in the background is an Estonian folk memory.

By that I mean a place to be - to live, and to be alive. So much of life is escapism from something else – which is why I have never owned a TV - and John Lennon’s quote seems apt: “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.”

At the suvila, there is, I suppose, escape, and there is also arrival, in my case to something fairly basic. At this time there’s no cellphone reception or Internet, lighting is solar powered, heating is by way of a wood stove, there are 2 gas cookers, a composting toilet, water is drawn from a large tank down at the other sheds, and the shower is a gas-powered califont with a pump run off a car battery. If you get bored, you can play pétanque, plant trees, scythe the grass, or cut firewood.

All comfortable in a rustic sense. At this time of the year in New Zealand, the cabin and shed are more of a talvela, a winter retreat, and after 20 minutes of firing up the stove - a Turkish pizza oven - the place is cozy and warm. You would call it gmüetlich if a Swiss person, or hygge if a Dane.

I don’t know if there’s an Estonian expression for enjoying dinner and a glass of wine with friends, basking in the dry heat of a wood fire, stars shining brightly outside, a waning moon rising through the pine trees, and the frost about to settle on the deck. Perhaps, expected and no need to mention it.