Last week, I attended a retirement party, where I met an employee of the Twin Cities’ American Swedish Institute. Driving home, I reminisced about an elementary school field trip to the institute, about hopping on the bus with all of my friends, wearing our blue plaid St. Pete’s uniforms with our classic Nike white-with-the-red-swoosh tennis shoes. And about being awestruck when we arrived at the bona fide mansion that was the American Swedish Institute. Until that day, I had thought of Sweden as some dusty old country, nothing more than a place people’s ancestors came from. In my mind, the women of Sweden still wore wooden shoes and old-timey dresses, and spent their days churning butter and baking bread. That day, we learned a bit about Swedish history, but also about current-day Sweden, which was, the guide claimed, every bit as “modern” as life in the United States. 

That half-day field trip was a spark to my curiosity, about Sweden and the many other countries I had considered only as the stuck-in-the-past homelands of my and my classmates’ ancestors. My education continued in Forest Lake Area Schools, with some absolutely fantastic social studies teachers, who helped me feed that curiosity. So much so, that a decade later, when my husband and I were looking for teaching jobs, we leaped at the opportunity to teach in Europe and then in the Pacific before moving back home to raise our children near our extended families.

  
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