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cimoreneWe live in a tiny town with only one commercial street, but spread out with low population density. Our island of Ålön is about 77 square kilometers (about 44 square miles), and most of it is farms and forests.
My late MIL's summer cottage was fifteen minutes by car out towards one of the corners of the island, in the village of Levo, but what a world of difference! Behind its little orchard stretched fallow and planted fields; across the winding road lay a little forest, and on the other side of that the bay of Finland. (The neighbors gave permission to park extra cars in their field and to use their little scrap of sand and dock for swimming.) The music of the evening in Levo was birdsong and the rushing of the wind.
Here one block behind city hall and the police station, in the village of Parsby, we sit in the midst of urban decay, as mentioned recently. Our little street contains three inhabited houses and two abandoned wrecks that the city owns and is allowing to fall into public health hazards, with asbestos everywhere, roofs caving in, broken windows, and fallen trees and power lines. The street leading down to the back of the police station contains two more inhabited houses and three more decaying wrecks, and the city tore all the pavement on it up last January to fix the pipes and hasn't paved it again yet. Across the other street (we live on the corner) is a big clot of densely-populated midcentury apartment buildings, whose retired inhabitants risk their lives on the above-mentioned poorly-maintained ripped-up road in winter (it's a steep hill).
Because our town is rural and the driving age for cars is 18 in Finland, the plague of Parsby (and small towns everywhere) is teenagers on mopeds. The music of the evening in Parsby starts with wood pigeons, thrushes, and the distant buzzing of cars on the highway, but is interrupted periodically by the deafening roar of mopeds speeding by under the window and teenagers practicing being cool and adult by shouting the equivalent of "FUCK" at each other. (I fantasize several times a week about an externally-mounted loudspeaker that would play a voice yelling "Shut up" towards the street.)
It would've been impossible to quickly walk to the store from Levo, though.
My late MIL's summer cottage was fifteen minutes by car out towards one of the corners of the island, in the village of Levo, but what a world of difference! Behind its little orchard stretched fallow and planted fields; across the winding road lay a little forest, and on the other side of that the bay of Finland. (The neighbors gave permission to park extra cars in their field and to use their little scrap of sand and dock for swimming.) The music of the evening in Levo was birdsong and the rushing of the wind.
Here one block behind city hall and the police station, in the village of Parsby, we sit in the midst of urban decay, as mentioned recently. Our little street contains three inhabited houses and two abandoned wrecks that the city owns and is allowing to fall into public health hazards, with asbestos everywhere, roofs caving in, broken windows, and fallen trees and power lines. The street leading down to the back of the police station contains two more inhabited houses and three more decaying wrecks, and the city tore all the pavement on it up last January to fix the pipes and hasn't paved it again yet. Across the other street (we live on the corner) is a big clot of densely-populated midcentury apartment buildings, whose retired inhabitants risk their lives on the above-mentioned poorly-maintained ripped-up road in winter (it's a steep hill).
Because our town is rural and the driving age for cars is 18 in Finland, the plague of Parsby (and small towns everywhere) is teenagers on mopeds. The music of the evening in Parsby starts with wood pigeons, thrushes, and the distant buzzing of cars on the highway, but is interrupted periodically by the deafening roar of mopeds speeding by under the window and teenagers practicing being cool and adult by shouting the equivalent of "FUCK" at each other. (I fantasize several times a week about an externally-mounted loudspeaker that would play a voice yelling "Shut up" towards the street.)
It would've been impossible to quickly walk to the store from Levo, though.
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Date: 6 Aug 2025 11:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 6 Aug 2025 02:50 pm (UTC)Although they've been there at least ten years for the eldest, maybe more like twenty?, so apparently it isn't that tempting to the local teens (or else they haven't happened to fall down any wells or whatever). I have seen neighbor kids chasing a ball into the property though, and I was on the verge of marching over there to talk to them, but then I saw them emerge again unscathed.