Freya —
I said a wrong thing on Sunday, or a right thing in the wrong order, which with us comes to the same. I have been drafting the apology for three days and it keeps turning into an explanation, so I am sending you the dog instead. Not really. But Knut has walked to the door with me every morning this week and stood in the wind with his ears doing the thing you used to laugh at, and he is fifteen now, and I thought: she should know the ears still do the thing. That is the kind of news I have.
The dark came down early this year. You will remember it, or you will remember hating it — the fortnight where the light goes and everyone at the station starts speaking more quietly, as if the sun were a thing that could be woken. The work is going into a quiet spell of its own. There are things about this winter I am not allowed to put in a letter, which I know is a sentence you have heard from me in one shape or another your whole life, and I know what it costs you, and this time I am not going to pretend the choosing isn’t mine.
I called Bergen on Tuesday. Your grandfather talked for forty minutes and let me say perhaps nine words, which is how I knew he was tired — he only fills the line like that when he is afraid of what I might put in a pause. He wants to hear the sea. He said it twice, once as a joke about the harbour and once not as a joke at all. When the winter run is finished I will go south and open the windows of that house and sit him where the gulls are, and if you can come down from Oslo we will be three generations in one kitchen, which last happened, by my count, too long ago for the count to be worth finishing.
When the run is finished. You are allowed to read that phrase in my handwriting and roll your eyes. You have earned it.
You told me once that I listen to everything except the people in the room. I am not writing to argue with that. I am writing so that there is one thing in the world, in ink, with a date on it, that says: I heard you.
— Mamma