By cycle

First long ride on my bicycle this year, spring is in the air, 35 km, through Staffanstorp and then by Torup and the village of Bara, where my in-laws live. It was a slogan contest in just a few years ago. Someone had thought that they would have one of those pleasant and welcoming sign when you drive into the village, such as Vellinges "where the freedom is greater " which by the way they will take down today I read in the newspaper. I had a lot of funny suggestions for a slogan that I never sent in for the contest, and no longer remember either. They were probably as worthless as the winning entry, which I now passed by, "Welcome to Bara experience for all." I cycled through the relatively newly constructed row or terraced area, small pastel-colored wooden house with its own small garden plot. The sun was hardly seen through the clouds but still managed to shed more than a hazy light. The people had gone out and put themselves in the uncertain and clumsy newly deployed garden chairs. A couple sat in separate chairs with black quilted jackets, looking at a smoking grill. The trees are still bare, it shows small embryos to buds and leaves on the curved ornamental tree branches.

A young man in white football shorts and white t-shirt digs a pit in one of these minimal gardens which is more than half occupied by a large round trampoline with blue plastic edge. He looks like an English hooligan, I think, muscular, densely tattooed on the arms. He also has tattoos on the lower part of the head with some sort of dandy brush haircut on the very top of the head. I wonder what he excavates, it might become a pool, maybe he's a plumber, and his wife, barber or tattoo artist?

He stands with his back to me in the half-meter deep pit and cast male spade fragrant spring earth in neat piles. His wife stands some distance away, turning to me smoking, she has white taights and a pink fleece sweater that nicely matches her blonde hair and the gray-white smoke from her mouth. I think it would have been a very luscious photography. These two against the pastel little wooden house, the pit and trampoline. Of course I did not dare to photograph them, what would I ask? "You look like that beautiful plebian out towards the little idyllic new row house, I can not get to take a picture?" No, I will try to save the image in my head instead. What is the the story you want to tell with such a photograph anyway? Is it lovingly or derisively?

I am reminded of my rhetorical question to myself when I cycle down to the back of the new giant shopping center on Toftanäs. The huge Coop store shows its back to the small remnant of land which was brutally cut off where the highway shoots his rustling carpet towards Malmö. The cycle path goes under the highway, a deserted houses burned down this past winter. Probably cable burner that happened to spill fire or young people who sought the magic of heat and the burning candle. Over the open field, a slender man of my age and a boy of about eighteen years old walks towards me, they are equally long and bears on each loaded paper bag from the store and an opened beer bottle in the other hand which they occasionally drink from. The man wears a suit, such a suit that men in the southern countries often wears. It looks as if he grew into it, it's beautiful. The boy has worn blue jeans and a black Waist motorcycle leather jacket with white stripes on the sleeves. They walk slowly and talk quietly ... and it's so cinematic ... romantic, and yet so raw, the huge rear of the shopping center as a backdrop and the barren field with occasional tufts as they walk across. Does it matter what story they tell?