twitching tail at the end of its sleek body. It was here in the garden too, but hardly
aware of it in the same way as Sophie.
As Sophie started to think about being alive, she began to realize that she would
not be alive forever. I am in the world now, she thought, but one day I shall be gone.
Was there a life after death? This was another question the cat was blissfully
unaware of.
It was not long since Sophie’s grandmother had died. For more than six months
Sophie had missed her every single day. How unfair that life had to end!
Sophie stood on the gravel path, thinking. She tried to think extra hard about
being alive so as to forget that she would not be alive forever. But it was impossible.
As soon as she concentrated on being alive now, the thought of dying also came into
her mind. The same thing happened the other way around: only by conjuring up an
intense feeling of one day being dead could she appreciate how terribly good it was to
be alive. It was like two sides of a coin that she kept turning over and over. And the
bigger and clearer one side of the coin became, the bigger and clearer the other side
became too.
You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she
thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how
incredibly amazing it is to be alive.
Sophie remembered Granny saying something like that the day the doctor told
her she was ill. “I never realized how rich life was until now,” she said.
How tragic that most people had to get ill before they understood what a gift it
was to be alive. Or else they had to find a mysterious letter in the mailbox!
Perhaps she should go and see if any more letters had arrived. Sophie hurried to
the gate and looked inside the green mailbox. She was startled to find that it contained
another white envelope, exactly like the first. But the mailbox had definitely been
empty when she took the first envelope! This envelope had her name on it as well.
She tore it open and fished out a note the same size as the first one.
Where does the world come from? it said.
I don’t know, Sophie thought. Surely nobody really knows. And yet—Sophie
thought it was a fair question. For the first time in her life she felt it wasn’t right to
live in the world without at least inquiring where it came from.
The mysterious letters had made Sophie’s head spin. She decided to go and sit
in the den.
The den was Sophie’s top secret hiding place. It was where she went when she
was terribly angry, terribly miserable, or terribly happy. Today she was simply con-
fused.
***
The red house was surrounded by a large garden with lots of flowerbeds, fruit
bushes, fruit trees of different kinds, a spacious lawn with a glider and a little gazebo
that Granddad had built for Granny when she lost their first child a few weeks after it
was born. The child’s name was Marie. On her gravestone were the words: “Little
Marie to us came, greeted us, and left again.”
Down in a corner of the garden behind all the raspberry bushes was a dense
thicket where neither flowers nor berries would grow. Actually, it was an old hedge
that had once marked the boundary to the woods, but because nobody had trimmed it
for the last twenty years it had grown into a tangled and impenetrable mass. Granny
used to say the hedge made it harder for the foxes to take the chickens during the war,