Sitting at home drinking coffee alone on a Thursday morning and absentmindedly looking out the window, small-family-home designer Rein Vihalemm felt he was starting to slowly turn into a fox. It was a strange feeling. The architect's moods became vigilantly alert, his nostrils awoke to sense new and interesting aromas and Rein's gaze would unexpectedly, even to him, focus on the neighbor's yard – where chickens strutted about, one meatier than the next.

My father was obviously of a different opinion. He wanted to be a modern person, and a modern person should live in a village, under the open sky and the sun, not in a murky forest. He should grow rye, work all summer like some filthy ant, so that in autumn he could look important and gobble bread and be like the foreigners.