Swedish Song - Now We Have Summer Now We Have Sun

Years back a cousin and I enjoyed the sunny chairs not far from the Ted Brown Music Store. I showed her a Scandinvian Song Book from Ted Brown Music. She told me Nu är det sommar nu är det sol had been our grandmother's favorite song.

This is a different version of the song about dancing in the woods in the moonlight. The tune of the song was among those performed by my mother and uncles in their family dance band, the Gord Family Orchestra.

Nu är det sommar nu är det sol / nu är det koskit i hagen / och kärringskrallet sitter på en stol / med fullt av kakor i magen. / Kom ska jag kaska koskit på dig / så att du tappar andan.

Now we have summer now we have sun / now we have cowshit in the meadow / and the old woman rattling sits in a chair / but full of cake in the stomach. / I am going to cast cow shit at you / so that you draw a breath.

During one discussion of The Crucible, a panel about the McCarthy Hearings, during Tacoma Reads Together in 2006, I brought up a book I had been reading - a treatise about the word bullshit. One topic of the book was that the term bullshit refers to language that obscures meaning. The term also is used the punctuate sentences for shock emphasis, and when the term is used this way, it is usually used over and over.

I tried to find Nu är det sommar nu är det sol on the internet. The song with "nu är det koskit i hagen" was the only thing I could find. Where my grandmother was a child in Finland was out in the country and perhaps she knew this alternative version, too, from her childhood. Perhaps this version is very far from meaningless, but is a jewel from the great treasure of children's rhymes.

Perhaps this jewel from the great treasure of children's rhymes is here, being passed on to another generation of children.

The dancer/singer who performs this song for children At Den flygande mattan wears a rather traditional sailor costume and uses lots of leg and arm gestures and energy. The children in the audience are just beginning upper elementary school grades. I think this is an outreach to the children to take on healthy eating and exercise behavior.

There are problems. In our time a dancer can be perceived to use a private car. With this luxury there is a baggage of car-dependent guilt, blame, and road rage. How does the singer and the filmed program make sure they are not taking all this out on the helpless, innocent little ones?

It is terrible to think of the committee that arrives at a school in their several cars to "Carrie Nation" the school hallway snack machine.