Today marks the tenth anniversary since my moving to Sweden. A few days later, I began the publication of the Chronicles, my most personal space, to tell the story of what it meant to live where - until then - I had simply traveled; especially from a naturalistic and photographic point of view, of course.
Since then, 530 images of "home" and other places in the North where I have been and loved have appeared, including this one on the side.
You can browse the very first years here (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010) and the following ones in the monthly archives in the right column on this page.

To celebrate this birthday I could not find any more appropriate shot than this recent portrait of one of the protagonists in those pages: my garden’s squirrel.

A local (zero kilometers) photo if any, in fact just 90 centimeters, measured. This is the distance that separates the kitchen window, where I am having my meals, from the feeder for birds (and other animals). Nothing special here around: every Swede living in rural areas (probably 80% of the whole country) has a feeder in shape of a cabin full of food just outside the kitchen and shares meals with other guests, looking them in the eyes from the other side of the glass. I'm no exception, and as an immigrant who craves assimilation and wants to adapt to local customs, the feeder was just the second accessory added to my tiny palace (the first being a bed) after the moving.

When you go to Nipfjället in the summer you can be sure to get big male reindeer or dramatic skies. Sometime both of them together.
(click on the image to enlarge it)

I'm now back from a travel to another North, one as much beloved as my "home range" one: the Varanger Peninsula, where the sky is a show for its own, a worthy background for the beauty which a nature as wild as seldom elsewhere in the continent gives in spades.
To the left, Tana River Delta; to the right, evening clouds over Ekkerøy