Tonight I’m sipping spiced tea but not exactly the way my grandmother used to make it. No Tang. No Country Time. Those ingredients don’t exist here, banned like a tiny footnote to American excess. The taste is still close enough to pull a chair up from the past. (Recipe for Spiced Tea will be posted separately)
My grandmother lived to be 104. She was also a teacher, by trade and by temperament. Even outside the classroom, she believed knowledge was a form of protection and that understanding the world was a civic duty. Long enough to remember the Great Depression not as a chapter heading, but as a feeling. Long enough to live through every major war of the twentieth century and still believe, stubbornly, in democracy. She was a lifelong Democrat. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was her president (fun fact, I share the same birthday as FDR). When I interviewed her years ago about the Depression and the wars, she quoted him without hesitation: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
At the time, that quote felt like bedrock. She said it the way teachers do, not as comfort, but as instruction. Fear was something you confronted, named, and then moved through. Fear didn’t get to run the house.
Now I sit here wondering what she would say if she could see this moment. If she could see the headlines scroll endlessly across my phone. If she could see the United States from the outside, the way I see it now, living an ocean away. A country that once wrapped itself in the language of freedom now increasingly framed as a warning rather than a model.
I wonder what she would think about me leaving. About watching my home country from Sweden, trying to explain it to people who ask careful, worried questions. About how disorienting it is to love a place while acknowledging that, right now, it is often the bad actor in the room.
Back then, fear came with uniforms, breadlines, ration cards, and telegrams. It was brutal but legible. Today, fear is amorphous. It lives in algorithms, disinformation, power grabs, and the slow erosion of trust. It doesn’t announce itself with a siren. It hums constantly in the background.
So what now, when fear itself feels smarter, faster, and better funded?
I think about how my grandmother lived through real catastrophe and still believed people could build something better afterward. Teaching through war, depression, and upheaval meant believing the future was worth preparing students for, even when the present was grim. She didn’t confuse cynicism with wisdom. She stayed informed, but she also lived her life. She laughed. She made tea. She voted. She paid attention without surrendering her humanity.
If she were here, I suspect she’d remind me that fear is still the point of leverage, even when it wears new clothes. That the lesson has always been the same, even if the test keeps changing. And that refusing to be ruled by it doesn’t mean being naive. It means choosing values over panic. Curiosity over despair. Responsibility over comfort.
So tonight, I drink my spiced tea in a country that feels calmer and steadier, and I hold that old quote up to the present moment. Not as nostalgia, but as a challenge.
Fear is loud right now. But it still doesn’t deserve the final word.
Take time away from social media and just be with yourself. Create something. Spend time with those you love. Don’t shut down over fear of the unknown. This too shall pass.
Swedish Wanderlust 