Every Finn owns a summer house.
The purpose of a summer house is multi - : it is meant for relaxing on holidays, using your extra energy to useful everyday tasks such as wood chopping, getting back to the nature or perhaps running away from something. In any case, summer house is situated away from the city and near by nature.
The style of summer houses vary. One can buy a regular house from country side and call it second home or a summer house, even a cottage. Others just rent one for a week here or a month there. Some resorts, in higher Lapland, have cottage villages built in the middle of no- where, where you can buy yourself a cabin for a certain period of the year.
My summer house is made of the traditional Finnish log wood, so it is actually a real cabin. It is small in size and has a fireplace and dining area, a small kitchen and two small bedrooms. There is no running water so toilets are separated and “traditional”, with a big bucket build under a look- a- like toilet. Wooden Sauna, built in same style as the main building, is located by the water to make ice dipping possible during winters, and pleasant swimming in the lake by summer time.

Usually these places are in peace and quiet where you can hear the waves of the lake splashing to the shore, birds signing and leaves of the trees dancing in the wind. However, at our lake, there had been burglars a few weeks back. They had arrived by the skiing and snowmobiling tracks driving their quad bikes as the only road to the lake is locked with a gate. They had gotten into two other cabins and stolen TV:s, radios, microwaves and  other small electronics people had left in to their precious get- away- places. From then on, we made extra sure we lock the gate in the beginning of the road and hide our second pair of keys to the cottages into special places such as under the sauna or behind the outdoor toilets.

This weekend I head for some peace and quiet and relaxing weekend picking mushrooms and berries around the lake side. After a hard day outdoors and a massive catch of 10 liters of lingon berries, I set the fire, made some dinner and took a nice romantic women’s book and went to bed.

In the early morning hours I woke up. The sun had barely risen but I could hear the birds had woken up too.
Then there was a load thud coming from outside. My eyes flew open and I stood up breathing heavily. Someone was on the porch.

I got out of the warm bed and sneaked out of the bedroom to the dining area. I was standing behind the locked door listening. More thuds and a load crack. Something had gone broken. I had no idea what I was doing: I was scared like hell, wetting my pants nearly and I realized I didn’t even have any kind of a weapon! I clutched on to the big torch that had lighten up my path earlier when I went for the toilet in the back of the yard and I put my hands of the door handle. I knew I could really blew it and hurt myself or the others. Or I could be the heroine of the day and save all the cottages from being robbed and my name would be in the news paper. I decided I wanted to become famous and I opened the lock.

I swung the door open to the porch screaming my lungs out and scaring the shit out of the poor, old, grey, reindeer eating the porch flowers.

Lotta Lonka