Cafe Break 2

Through the park, carefully avoiding cyclists as we cross their half of the marked track, we follow the path that now meets and runs along the Toolonlahti lake shore. There are wide clumps of sedge grass here that whisper in the puffs of cool breeze, turning the grass heads so that shyly it seems they look in surprise at the summer dragonflies. Just a little further along here we came and sat in the summer cafe at tables set between the reeds. Eating cinnamon buns we could gaze across at the Linnunlaulu (Birdsong) villa on the opposite bank and listen to what the swans heard.


In these winter photographs there are no signs of the summer cafe. When Tove Jansson's Moomintroll wakes from his winter sleep and seeks refuge from the snows in the Moomin's old octagonal bathing-house he finds it strangely changed and has several oddly disturbing thoughts and feelings. '"I used to dive from here," Moomintroll whispered very softly and looked at the yellowed and broken reeds that stuck out of the ice.'


So, in this northern hemisphere, as the weather turns around I begin to pack away the things of summer.


'Moomintroll drank his soup.
He looked at the cupboard in the corner and thought of how nice it was to know that his own old bathing-gown was hanging inside it, and that something certain and cosy still remained in the middle of all the new and worrying things. He knew that his bathing-gown was blue and that its hanger was missing, and that there was probably a pair of sunglasses in the left pocket.' Tove Jansson, Moominland Winter.