A beautiful day in my hometown of Bohuslän, Sweden. Photo by Jolantis on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

My childhood hometown’s flag has three crudely rendered medieval images artlessly arranged — it’s a veritable tribute to asymmetry. A blue sword. A red castle. A blue lion (humping the castle?) Technology of the 21st century seems ludicrous and hostile, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge that the images on my hometown’s flag appear to be preeminent examples of Microsoft Word’s stock picture options.

Before we moved to Norway, my family and I lived in a hut 12 minutes inland. My father and I would fish among the rocky islands off Sweden’s coastline and after particularly hearty catches, he’d salute the flags on top of our home when we returned. There were always three, arranged vertically: Our family crest, a serpent’s tongue, on top; Sweden’s, stout and comfortable even in the terrorizing wind; and Bohuslän’s, forever snagging and tearing and tangling within itself.

Bohuslän’s flag needed replacing three or four times as I grew up. My mother could sew it from memory and I loved watching the sword take shape on the flag, a tantalizingly electric blue in the sea of white. There was something alluring and heroic in the blade’s solitude. It seemed for me, somehow, to represent a final, impenetrable defense. Even should the lion, against all odds, scale the castle, the sword still held its ground beyond, a glistening, awesome pillar.

At age 14, I traveled with my parents north to Norway. The fish in Bohuslän had become scarce and our province was fleeing the incursion of barbarians from the South. My father presented me with a gift before our departure, a sword wrapped in a goatskin sheath. I tested its balance and its girth in the wind with two hands as my father had taught me with sticks — decent. The steel tip was blunt and the blade near the base was uneven and almost serrated with rust. But in the morning sun it glowed a distinct, almost phosphorescent, blue.

Once we’d finished setting up our new hut, my father began to hoist up our flags. The family crest, Sweden’s. I grabbed his arm when he finished — what about Bohuslän’s? It was too dangerous, he said, now that we were beyond her borders. That night I hoisted it up anyway and waited with my blue-gleaming sword. Should the barbarians ransack Bohuslän and come north, should they mount our hut and plunder our wares, they’d still have me and my stalwart blade to face. And they’d suffer.