When I look back on my life, I see a narrow, sun-drenched path winding through it. It is covered with tiny little flowers in lovely, tender colors that a slender white hand never grew tired of sowing. The blossoms of every good thing stand here in a row, nodding to each other in fond understanding, hidden emotions, gentle thoughts, and deep harmonious joy. Their perfume is love, their name is sister.

She was called Johanne, and she was four and a half years older than me. I see her walking along the tiled edge of a gutter that seems endlessly wide to me as it carries a rushing river of cornflower-blue water away from a dye shop up the street. The sun bakes the small provincial street, so she holds a fragile little mahogany table over her head like a parasol to protect herself from the sun's rays.

My parents told me later that this memory picture must belong to the day when our sparse household goods arrived from Copenhagen in Malmö [Sweden], where my father—after a long period of unemployment—had gotten a job, thanks to my mother's brother, as a journeyman miller at Malmö's large steam mill, where my uncle held a rather high-level post.

I was one and a half years old at the time. My parents had only us two children; their first-born child had died at a year old, to my mother’s passionate sorrow, which, although it gradually became milder, lasted for many years. I remember accompanying her, as a grown girl, to the baby’s grave in Assistens Cemetery. She visited the grave every spring, picking a spray of white blossoms from a lovely low, thick-trunked tree that spread its white glamour over the nondescript grave. It appeared even smaller owing to the small gray circle of cement holding a few straggling flowers in the middle, while the harshness of the passing seasons had eradicated every trace of the hedge that had once guarded the child's rightful property.

As long as we lived in Malmö, my mother's sister sent her a spray of flowers from the grave, which lived a brief half-life in a glass of water on the dresser for a few days, after which they were placed in the uppermost drawer on top of my mother's confirmation hymnbook.