VERY year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the flashlight is hung up on its peg beside the door.

Not right away, but little by little and incidentally, things begin to shift position in order to follow the progress of the seasons. Day by day, everything moves closer to the house. Sophia’s father takes in the tent and the water pump. He removes the buoy and attaches the cable to a cork float. The boat is pulled ashore on a cradle, and the dory is hung upside down behind the woodyard. And so fall begins. A few days later, they dig the potatoes and roll the water barrel up against the wall of the house. Buckets and garden tools move in toward the house, ornamental pots disappear, Grandmother’s parasol and other transitory and attractive objects all change places. The fire extinguisher and the axe, the pick and the snow shovel, appear on the veranda. And at the same time, the whole landscape is transformed.

Grandmother had always liked this great change in August, most of all, perhaps, because of the way it never varied: a place for everything and everything in its place. Now was the time for the traces of habitation to disappear, and, as far as possible, for the island to return to its original condition. The exhausted flower beds were covered with banks of seaweed. The long rains did their leveling and rinsing. All the flowers still in bloom were either red or yellow, strong patches of color above the seaweed. In the woods were a few enormous white roses that blossomed and lived for one day in breathless splendor.

Grandmother’s legs ached, which may have been due to the rain, and she couldn’t walk around the island as much as she wanted to. But she went out for a little while every day just before dark, and tidied up the ground. She picked up everything that had to do with human beings. She gathered nails and bits of paper and cloth and plastic, pieces of lumber covered with oil-spill, and an occasional bottle top. She went down to the shore and built fires where everything burnable could go right ahead and burn, and all the time she felt the island growing cleaner and cleaner, and more and more foreign and distant. It’s shaking us off, she thought. It will soon be uninhabited. Almost.

The nights got darker and darker. There was an unbroken chain of navigational lights and beacons along the horizon, and sometimes big boats thumped by in the channel. The sea was motionless.

When the ground was clean, Sophia’s father painted all the ringbolts with red lead, and one warm, rainless day he soaked the veranda with seal fat. He oiled the tools and the hinges, and swept the chimney. He put away the nets. He stacked wood against the wall by the stove for next spring, and for anyone who might be shipwrecked on the island, and he tied down the woodshed with ropes because it stood so near the high-water mark.

“We have to take in the flower stakes,” Grandmother said. “They spoil the landscape.” But Sophia’s father let them be, for otherwise he wouldn’t know what was there in the ground when they came back. Grandmother worried about a lot of things. “Suppose someone lands here,” she said. “They always do. They wouldn’t know the coarse salt is in the cellar, and the trapdoor may have swelled from the damp. We have to bring up the salt and label it, so they won’t think it’s sugar. And we ought to put out some more pants—there’s nothing worse than wet pants. What if they hang their nets over the flower bed and trample it all down? You never know about roots.” A little later, she started worrying about the stovepipe and put up a sign: “Don’t close the damper. It might rust shut. If it doesn’t draw, there may be a bird’s nest in the chimney—later on in the spring, that is.”

“But we’ll be back by then,” Sophia’s father said.

“You never know about birds,” Grandmother said. She took down the curtains a week early and covered the south and east windows with disposable paper bedsheets, on which she wrote, “Don’t remove the window covers or the fall birds will try to fly right through the house. Use anything you need, but please carry in some more wood. There are tools under the workbench. Enjoy yourselves.”

“Why are you in such a rush?” Sophia asked, and her grandmother answered that it was a good idea to do things before you forgot that they had to be done. She set out cigarettes and candles, in case the lamp didn’t work, and she hid the barometer, the sleeping bags, and the seashell box under the bed. Later, she brought out the barometer again. She never hid the figurine. Grandmother knew no one understood sculpture, and she thought it wouldn’t hurt them to be exposed to a little culture. She also made Papa leave the rugs on the floor, so the room wouldn’t look unfriendly over the winter.

Covering two of the windows changed the room, made it secretive and conspiratorial, and, at the same time, very lonely.

Grandmother polished the handle on the door and scoured the garbage pail. The next day, she washed all her clothes out beside the woodyard. Then she was tired and went to the guest room. The guest room grew very crowded with the approach of fall—it was a good place to put all sorts of things that were waiting for spring or were no longer needed. Grandmother liked being surrounded by practical, commonplace things, and before she went to sleep, she studied everything around her: nets, nail kegs, coils of steel wire and rope, sacks full of peat, and other important items. With an odd kind of tenderness, she examined the nameplates of boats long since broken up, some storm indications that had been written on the wall, penciled data on dead seals they had found and a mink they had shot, and she dwelled particularly on the pretty picture of the hermit in his open tent against a sea of desert sand, with his guardian lion in the background. How can I ever leave this room? she thought.

It wasn’t easy to get into the room and take her clothes off and open the window for the night air, but finally she could lie down and stretch her legs. She blew out the light and listened to Sophia and her father getting ready for bed on the other side of the wall. There was a smell of tar and wet wool and maybe a trace of turpentine, and the sea was still quiet. As Grandmother fell asleep, she remembered the chamberpot under the bed and how much she hated it, this symbol of helplessness. She had accepted it out of pure politeness. A chamberpot is nice to have when it’s storming or raining, but the next day you have to carry it clear down to the water, and anything that has to be hidden is a burden.

When she woke up, she lay for a long time and wondered if she should go out or not. It felt as if the night had come right up to the walls and was waiting outside, and her legs ached. The stairs were badly constructed. The steps were too high and too narrow, and then came the rock, which was slippery down toward the woodyard, and then you had to come all the way back again. No sense in lighting a light; it only makes you lose your sense of direction and distance, and the darkness comes closer. Swing your legs over the edge of the bed and wait for your balance to come right. Four steps to the door and open the latch and wait again, then five steps down, holding the handrail. Grandmother wasn’t afraid of falling or losing her way, but she knew the darkness was absolute, and she knew what it was like when you lose your hold and there’s nothing left to go by. All the same, she said to herself, I know perfectly well what everything looks like. I don’t have to see it. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and waited for a moment. She took the four careful steps to the door and opened the latch. The night was black, but no longer so warm; there was a fine, sharp chill. She went down the stairs very slowly, turned away from the house, and let go of the railing. It wasn’t as hard as she’d expected. As she crouched in the woodyard, she knew exactly where she was, and where the house and the sea and the woods were. From far off in the channel came the thump of a boat sailing past, but she couldn’t see the channel lights.

Grandmother sat down on the chopping stump to wait for her balance. It came quickly, but she stayed where she was. The coastal freighter was headed east to Kotka. The sound of its diesel motors gradually died, and the night was as quiet as before. It smelled of fall. A new boat approached, a small boat, probably running on gasoline. It might be a herring boat with an automobile engine—but not this late at night. They always went out right after sunset. In any case, it wasn’t in the channel but heading straight out to sea. Its slow thumping passed the island and continued out, farther and farther away, but never stopping.

“Isn’t that funny,” Grandmother said. “It’s only my heart, it’s not a herring boat at all.” For a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She guessed she would stay for a while.