The Winter Room by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

“It was when I was young and was thought fit only to sharpen the tools of the older men. This was wrong, wrong then and wrong now, but that is the way they did things in the old country. So each day I sat in front of the cottage and drew the stone over the axes and filed the saws until there was only new steel and the axes could shave the hair off your arm.

“It was when I was young and a day came when a girl walked by as I was sharpening tools and she was so beautiful she made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth and I could not speak. Yellow hair she had, yellow hair like cornsilk mixed with sunlight. It was so long she had it coiled in a braid at the back of her head. And her eyes were clear blue. Ice blue. She was carrying a towel filled with loaves of bread to take to the cutters in the woods and she stopped and said good day to me and I could not answer.

“Could not answer.

“And that was Alida. She became my wife and let her hair down for me in great coils in the light from tallow candles. I could not live without her. We were married there in the old country and I put the handkerchief on my head to show I would be a good husband. I grew from sharpening tools to using an ax and a bucksaw and we planned to come to America, planned and saved. But soon Alida was with child and we had to stay and when the child came it was a wrong birth and the child died and Alida died and I died.

“I wandered into the woods along Nulsek Fjord, walked in the snow and wind and would not have come back except that my brother Nels came for me and found me and brought me with him to America to work where there was new wood to cut and woods that go to the sky. But I never remarried and never looked at another woman and my heart has never healed, and that is the story of Alida.”

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