Free The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

some friendly thoughts about them all the same. Then she’d think about how the Scouting movement had grown too large and lost its personal touch, and then she’d forget the whole thing. Grandmother’s children had never been Scouts. No one had had the time, somehow, and it never came up.
    One summer, Sophia’s father bought a tent and put it up in the ravine so he could hide there if too many people came. The tent was so small that you had to crawl in on all fours, but inside there was enough room for two if they lay close together. But no candles or lamps were allowed.
    “Is it a Scout tent?” Sophia asked.
    Grandmother snorted. “We sewed our own tents,” she said, remembering what they had looked like – huge, sturdy, greyish-brown. This was a toy, a bright yellow plaything for veranda guests, and not worth having.
    “Isn’t it a Scout tent?” asked Sophia anxiously.
    So grandmother said maybe it was, but a very modern one, and they crawled in and lay down side by side.
    “Now you’re not allowed to go to sleep,” Sophia said. “You have to tell me what it was like to be a Scout and all the things you did.”
    A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she had lost the urge.
    “We had campfires,” she answered briefly, and suddenly she felt sad.
    “And what else?”
    “There was a log that burned for a long time. We sat around the fire. It was cold out. We ate soup.”
    That’s strange, Grandmother thought. I can’t describe things any more. I can’t find the words, or maybe it’s just that I’m not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it’s as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it’s lost. She sat up and said, “Some days I can’t remember very well. But sometime you ought to try and sleep in a tent all night.”
     
    Sophia carried her bedclothes to the tent. She closed the door to her little cottage and said goodbye as the sun went down. All by herself, she walked out to the ravine, which this evening had become an infinitely distant place, forsaken by God and man and Scout – a wilderness with an entire night ahead. She zipped shut the door of the tent and stretched out with the quilt up to her chin. The yellow tent glowed in the sunset, and suddenly it seemed very small and friendly. No one could look in and no one could look out; she was wrapped in a cocoon of light and silence. Just as the sun disappeared, the tent turned red and she fell asleep.
    The nights were already long and when Sophia woke up there was nothing to see but the dark. A bird flew over the ravine and screamed, first close by and then once more far away. It was a windless night, yet she could hear the sea. And there was no one in the ravine, yet the gravel crunched as if under someone’s foot. The sheltering tent had let in the night, as close as if she’d been sleeping on the open ground. More birds cried in various ways, and the darkness was filled with strange movements and sounds, the kind no one can trace or account for. The kind no one can even describe.
    “Oh, dear God,” Sophia said, “don’t let me get scared!” And immediately she started thinking about what it would be like to get scared. “Oh, dear God, don’t let them make fun of me if I do get scared!”
    She really listened for the first time in her life. And when she got out in the ravine, she noticed for the first time what the ground felt like under her toes and the soles of her feet. It was cold, grainy, terribly complicated ground that changed as she walked – gravel and wet grass and big flat stones, and every now and then some plant as high as a bush would brush against her legs. The ground was dark, but the sky had a faint, grey light. The island had grown tiny, floating on the water like a drifting leaf, but there was a light in the guest room window. Sophia