To the County Council at Umeå.

     There is water that is cold and dense as stone, you cannot drink it, and there is water which is so thin and weak that it does not help if you drink it, and there is water that shudders when you drink it so that you get the shivers; and there is water that is bitter and tastes of sweat; and some water is, as it were, dead, water spiders sink down through it as if it were air. Indeed water is like the sand on the shores of the sea, its numbers are countless. 

     So that the form which you, the County Council, have sent us to enable us to tell you what our water situation is, that is useless, there isn’t room for water in two lines. If you have lived for seventy years as I have done, then you will know so much about water that the whole County Council could drown in that knowledge.

     So I cannot say everything.

     When we moved up here to Kläppmyrliden we bought the place from Isaac Grundström; they had six children and thought it was too cramped. Theresa and I had of course no children, we had been married more than five years. Isaac Grundström was going to move to Bjurträsk and begin work at the sawmill—that was when we were cheated over water.

     We were here in March and viewed the house, and we asked: “What about water?”

     “Yes,” Isaac Grundström said, “we have always had water.”

     And they went with us out to the well—the path was covered with snow—it was behind the cowshed; and he sent the bucket down, it was pretty deep, twenty-five feet he said, and we could hear the bucket hitting water, and at that he jerked the chain so that the bucket filled and then he wound it up, and there was clear water, though perhaps a trifle yellow. And I took the scoop and tasted it.

     “Yes,” I said, “though it has a smoky smell. And tastes of air. It can’t be denied that it reminds one of water from melted snow.”

     And then he took the scoop and drank.

     “It tastes of rock,” he said. “You can tell that it is water from a well.”

     “Yes,” I said. “Or water that has pushed up through the ice.”

     “No,” he said. “Water from a well.”

     Though why should we quarrel about water, there was after all water, so I said:  “Water never tastes the same to two people.”

     “No one has ever complained about the water here in Kläppmyrliden,” he said.

     “This thing about water is a sort of habit,” I said. “When you have drunk a certain water for a time, then your body is full of that water. And after that you can no longer tell its taste.” 

     So we bought Kläppmyrliden.

     But the first winter we lived here, about Candlemas it was, the well was dry.

     And we asked people, the neighbors: “How can it be that the well is empty? When we were here last year to look at the place, then there was water. And Isaac Grundström said that it never ran dry.”

     “That well, that runs dry every winter,” said the neighbors. “And some dry summers.”

     And into the bargain they said: “That was why Isaac Grundström moved. It was because of the water.”

     “Though last year there was water,” I said.

     “Never,” they then said. “But Isaac Grundström knew that you would ask: ‘What about water?’ So they filled up the well ready for when you came; they melted snow in the washtub, they worked for three days with the water, they carried it in buckets out to the well, Isaac and Agela and all the six children.”

     “So they filled the well with melted snow?” I said.

     “Yes.”

     “That’s how we were cheated.”