and its stain and our eyes habe become dulled, and we cannot see with the same purity, or love so well?
The coast road hugged at times the very edge of the cliffs and overlooked the Bay, so that on a fine day, to the east of us, there would be the harbor, with its occasional schooners and ferries, and beyond it the sea twitching so blindingly we were almost forced to turn our eyes away.
As we walked, Evan would be wearing his trousers and a shirt without a collar and his jacket and his cap. He wore stockings that Karen or my mother had knit, wonderful stockings in a variety of intricate patterns, and he carried his books and dinner sack, and sometimes also mine, in a leather strap which had been fashioned from a horse’s rein. I myself, though just a girl, wore the heavy dresses of the day, that is to say those of domestic and homespun manufacture, and it was always a pleasure in the late spring when our mother allowed me to change the wool dress for a calico that was lighter in weight and in color and made me feel as though I had just bathed after a long and oppressive confinement. At that time, I wore my hair loose along my back, with the sides pulled into a topknot. I may say here that my hair was of a lovely color in my youth, a light and soft brown that picked up the sun in summer, and was sometimes, by August, golden near the front, and I had fine, clear eyes of a light gray color. As I have mentioned, I was not a tall girl, but I did have a good carriage and figure, and though I was never a great beauty, not like Anethe, I trust I was pleasant to look upon, and perhaps even pretty for several years in my late youth, before the true responsibilities of my journey on earth began and altered, as it does in so many women, the character of the face.
I recall one morning when Evan and myself would have been eight and six years of age respectively. We had gone perhaps three quarters of the way to town when my brother quite suddenly put down his books and dinner sack and threw off his jacket and cap as well, and in his shirt and short pants raised his arms and leapt up to seize a branch of an apple tree that had just come fully into bloom, and I suspect that it was the prospect of losing himself in all that white froth of blossoms that propelled Evan higher and higher so that in seconds he was calling to me from the very apex of the tree. Hallo, Maren, can you see me? For reasons I cannot accurately describe, I could not bear to be left behind on the ground, and so it was with a frenzy of determination that I tried to repeat Evan’s acrobatics and make a similar climb to the height of the fruit tree. I discovered, however, that I was encumbered by the skirts of my dress, which were weighing me down and would not permit me to grab hold of the tree limbs with my legs in a shimmying fashion, such as I had just witnessed Evan performing. It was, then, with a gesture of irritation and perhaps anger at my sex, that I stripped myself of my frock, along that most travelled of public roads into Laurvig, stripped myself down to my underclothes, which consisted of a sleeveless woolen vest and a pair of unadorned homespun bloomers, and thus was able in a matter of minutes to join my brother at the top of the tree, which gave a long view of the coastline, and which, when I had reached Evan, filled me with a sense of freedom and accomplishment that was not often repeated in my girlhood. I remember that he smiled at me and said, “Well done,” and that shortly after I had reached Evan’s perch, I leaned forward in my careless ebullience to see north along the Laurvigsfjord, and, in doing so, lost my balance and nearly fell out of the tree, and almost certainly would have done had not Evan grabbed hold of my wrist and righted me. And I recall that he did not remove his hand, but rather stayed with me in that position, his hand upon my wrist, for a few minutes