The summer Greta fell off the dock
The summer of 1962, Anna was sixteen and her sister Greta was almost fourteen. Their father drove them up to Skagen the day after midsummer, the car windows down, the radio playing something her mother sang along to and the girls didn't know.
The dock was old even then. "It was the colour of bread that's been left out," Anna says, "the planks all silver. You could feel them giving a little when you walked out to the end." They went there every afternoon, with sandwiches and a book Greta refused to put down — Tove Jansson, the one with the comet.
It was the third or fourth afternoon when Greta started laughing about something — Anna can't remember what now, only that it was Greta's particular laugh, the one that started high and then collapsed. She laughed so hard she lost her balance. Off the dock, fully dressed, the book in her hand.
"She came up holding it above her head," Anna remembers, "like she was rescuing the only copy in the world. And the first thing she said wasn't 'Help me' or 'It's cold.' She just looked at me and said: 'The comet is going to be furious.'"
They couldn't stop laughing the whole walk home. By the time they got there the book was past saving, but Greta wouldn't let their mother throw it out. It sat on her bookshelf for the rest of her life — pages warped, cover spotted — a kind of monument to a moment too small to be a story but too perfect to forget.