Swede of the Mountains

We often hear what an education our kids receive just by living in another culture. People assume language is as automatic for children as the toy promised on the front of the cereal box. They are little sponges, after all. 

While I’m sure there’s truth to these things, what I see up close are other influences…

I see one heck of a junglee Swede. We have a very wild, white-haired three-year-old. 

I don’t mean wild, like naughty. I mean that she’s more like Mowgli from The Jungle Book than any princess. She is known to noiselessly sneak into our yard after breakfast and stay there. And with five other kids, it takes a while for me to notice. When I do look out my window, my sweet girl is stirring a bowl of snails to smithereens or laying shirtless on our dog Shadow, whispering indiscernible secrets into his fur. She picks guavas, climbs branches, replants the garden, and runs snails in tightly clenched fists upstairs into her bedroom so she can cuddle them instead of stuffies. When we read books, she coos at the salivating jaguar and tiger, missing the baby bunny with a bow. She eats spaghetti with her fingers like it’s daal chaval. When she’s full, she covers her plate with her hand and says “bas” like a girl who knows how to handle herself at an Indian wedding dhaam. She doesn’t seem to notice the spice in masala-flavored chips and eats fried pakoda on long drives. We take dates to get groceries on the scooty and Swede stands in the front between my legs with her mismatched shoes, pajama pants ripped at the knees, and sun-bleached bicycle helmet, which five minutes ago was housing a family of mollusks. She bosses around the cows in the road and mean-mugs the neighbors. For ten rupees, she buys herself a sucker and we go home. She dances like a rapper back to her snail collection, sticks her sucker in Shadow’s face to show him the flavor, and fills up his water dish singing “accha banaya”, a song she learned from Sunday school.  

We are all curious to see Swede in America this summer.