This Winter of Discontent

I’ve decided to let both the winter and the discontent fade away into the shadows. It seems to be up to me to feel good or bad, so I decide; Good.There will always be new lows, so who am I to cling on to something as boring as self-pity, gnashing of teeth? The “what ifs”, are usually non-productive anyway, even though I have to admit to some retrospective thinking that brougth me just to this point. However, I’ll try to get back to the girls. If memory serves, I was about to introduce the third girl. And here I have to add (or did I already?) that even if this resembles so many other tales on the theme “trinity”, so is this pure chance. It’s also true…

The small dirt-road to school was a scary place. Tall dark fir-trees, huge boulders. The girl was always hurrying, something that didn’t at all diminish the alarm she felt. But go to school she had to, and besides, it was only every other day. She was a small girl. Small for her age, and the littlest of the family. There were already nine brothers and sisters ahead of her, some of whom didn’t even live at home anymore. Mother was slowly losing her mind, and would soon be taken away to the asylum in the big town. She would come back, eventually, but by then there was already the wife of an older brother taking care of the running of the household. Father died when she was eight, his insides eaten away, slowly, painfully,inexorably. When she looked back on those childhood days she remembered good times however. The laughter, the singing and playing in that family of young people made up for the other side. The war-years when nothing was to be kept for oneself but sent away somewhere to soldiers in a foreing country. The poverty, the toiling in the field, the barn. The berry-, and mushroom-picking for the market days…There just wasn’t a dull moment to brood on how life could be in another way. In summer the houses down by the station and the school filled up with townspeople come to spend the holidays. There were new children to play with, and ofcourse extra work giving some additional money. All in all life was good.