May I introduce: Edla "Mollis" and Axel Ehrnberg, parents of my paternal grandmother.
An construction engineer, he had been born into one of Karlskrona´s leading and quite wealthy families, and he was one of the people in charge of surveilling the construction of the first railway through Sweden, the Stambanan - the principal artery of the railway system
all the way from south to north in the last half of the 19th century.
That was quite a distance!
Since the hotels were seldom found in the remote areas in those days, Axel had to put up at various farms en route when on his working missions. At one particular homestead in Jämtland - where he stayed for a long time - he got to know the estate owner´s daughter, Mollis, and fell in love. She was a free, wild girl of the woods who used to ride with flying hair across the estate - which took 7 days to accomplish! A far cry from the corsetted ladies of upper crust Karlskrona in those days. But could the she be tamed this wild girl and moved south to the plush plutocracy of Karlskrona?
He slipped the engagement ring on her finger and left for six years and then he came back for her. Love seemed to have endured and he brought her down south to marry and meet the society of his home town. I can see her in my imagination, sitting sipping coffee in a beautiful corsetted gown under the measuring glances of the upscale new world around her. She was never to ride again and to this day I wonder how she coped with this transition..
I met her when I was a little girl, when she was very old and widowed, living with my grandma in a huge apartment in Kungsholmen. And here they are, above, she and Axel with a firm grip on to his field glasses, all dressed up and with the traditional backdrop of the photo studio. I think of her off and on and one day I will go north to her farm in Sveg and take a tour of nostalgia. I hope.
This is her daughter - my grandmother - Astrid - in Karlskrona before getting married there to Paul Isberg Sr. Below with her first born (not my father) She had four children. And the well-to-do woman´s choice of monsterhats..
In her old age, she spent her summers in Sandhamn where I grew up, so I got to see quite a lot of my grandma and hear the stories of her untamed mother´s adventures far up in the north in Sweden a long, long time ago. Long before love´s inevitable committments and the restrictions and the absurde hats of another different world put an end to freedom and adventure.
And the feeling of the wind blowing freely through the hair.
