Trafika Europe 1 - Northern Idyll

about. Then she says that now you have learnt something you will never forget.

From that day on Ingrid cards much faster than Barbro, who is thereby relieved of this drudgery and can be in the barn or the boathouse repairing fishing nets like a man.

• WINTER BEGINS WITH A STORM. It is called The First Winter Storm. There have been storms here before, for example in August and September, bringing sudden and merciless turbulence to their lives. But as a rule these storms are short-lived. It is during one of them that the trees lose their leaves. As mentioned before, there are not many trees on the island but there are enough fruit bushes and dwarf birches and sallows - whose leaves in the course of late summer turn yellow, which then turn brown and red at varying rates - to make the island on some days in September resemble a rainbow on earth. And that is how it looks until a sudden storm is unleashed upon them, sweeping the colours into the sea, transforming Barrøy into a squealing, brown-furred animal, which it will remain until the next spring, unless it resembles a white- haired corpse beneath heaps of snow and slush, and the shifting snow comes and goes and comes once more, lying in drifts as though trying to imitate the sea on land. But

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