The island’s return to an uninhabited state

The island’s return to an uninhabited state is the family’s gradual late-summer withdrawal from The island, a process that turns departure into a practical ritual of preservation and an attempt to make the landscape seem as though people had never lived there. In August, the family moves equipment and domestic objects toward the house, removes signs of habitation, and prepares for weather, possible castaways, and a future spring return. Grandmother’s care makes the departure less an ending than a passage between seasons: The island is left empty, but not abandoned to disorder.

The season turns

Every year, the Scandinavian summer nights grow dark almost without warning. The first sudden pitch-black evening makes the change tangible: the kerosene can comes up from the cellar, and the lamp is put beside the door. Summer has not quite ended, but it has lost its life; autumn is not yet ready to begin. In this suspended interval, the family’s belongings begin to migrate inward, closer to the house, as though the changing season were drawing human activity into shelter.

Sophia’s father takes in the tent and water pump, removes the buoy, and replaces its cable with a cork float. The boat is hauled ashore on a cradle, while the dory is turned upside down behind the woodyard. A few days later, the potatoes are dug and the water barrel is rolled against the house. Buckets, garden tools, and ornamental pots follow. Objects that had served the open-air summer are gathered in; the fire extinguisher, axe, pick, and snow shovel come out onto the veranda. This reordering marks autumn’s actual beginning in the household before the season has fully announced itself in the weather.

Clearing the signs of habitation

Grandmother welcomes the August change partly because it follows a dependable order. The family’s work is not only to store what winter might damage, but also, as far as possible, to let The island recover its uninhabited appearance. Exhausted flower beds are covered with seaweed, and long rains level and rinse the ground. Red and yellow flowers remain as bright patches above the seaweed; in the woods, enormous white roses bloom for a single day. The landscape is not simply shut down. It is changing under the combined action of weather, vegetation, and human effort.

Grandmother participates despite aching legs that keep her from walking as far as she would like. Each day, just before dark, she goes out to tidy the ground, picking up nails, paper, cloth, plastic, oil-stained lumber, and bottle tops. At the shore she builds fires for what can be burned. The work makes The island cleaner, but also more remote: in her perception, it is shaking the family off and becoming almost uninhabited again. Her cleaning gives the seasonal transition a visible measure. What remains behind is not simply the family’s property put away, but a landscape from which the residues of their presence have been steadily removed.

That effort follows a summer in which people have visibly altered and crossed island space. A bulldozer has torn through woods and moss to make a road toward the sea, leaving broken trunks, exposed roots, and churned ground. On nearby Blustergull Rock, a businessman’s large house has interrupted the family’s accustomed horizon; its private-property sign prompts Grandmother and Sophia to land there as a demonstration of disapproval. The house becomes a landmark they continue to consider, especially when storms make them think about the owner’s boat and how it might be saved. Against these lasting intrusions, the August clearing is a modest counter-movement: it cannot undo human changes, but it can gather the family’s own scattered traces and restore some of the ground’s seasonal quiet.

Preparing for absence and return

The preparations extend beyond preserving the family’s possessions. Sophia’s father paints the ringbolts with red lead, treats the veranda with seal fat, oils tools and hinges, sweeps the chimney, and puts away the nets. He stacks wood beside the stove for next spring and for anyone shipwrecked on The island. Because the woodshed stands near the high-water mark, he ties it down with ropes. Each task addresses a specific vulnerability—rust, damp, fire, exposure, or winter water—so leaving the island empty requires continued attention to whoever or whatever may remain there.

Grandmother thinks through the needs of possible strangers in similarly practical detail. She worries that a visitor might mistake coarse salt in the cellar for sugar, find the trapdoor swollen by damp, lack dry leggings, or trample the flower bed while hanging nets. She asks that the salt be brought up and labelled and considers leaving more leggings. When she worries about the stovepipe, she posts a warning not to close the damper: it might rust shut, and a bird could nest in the chimney before spring. Her imagined visitors turn an apparently private act of winterizing into a small provision for unforeseen occupants. The family is leaving, but Grandmother refuses to treat the place as if no one might need it.

Her attention to birds and signs of life shapes the house as well. She takes down the curtains early and covers the south and east windows with disposable paper bedsheets, warning future occupants not to remove the covers lest autumn birds fly into the house. At the same time, she invites them to use what they need and carry in more wood. She sets out candles and cigarettes in case the lamp fails, hides some items under the bed, then brings the barometer back out; she leaves a figurine visible because she thinks an unfamiliar visitor might benefit from seeing sculpture. She also persuades Sophia’s father to leave the rugs, so the room will not seem unfriendly through the winter. The covered windows make it secretive and conspiratorial, but also lonely: preparations for others give the closed room an imagined audience without filling it with company.

A temporary emptiness

The distinction between leaving The island and severing its connections matters. Summer brings boats, visitors, work, and exchanges with the mainland. On Midsummer night, Eriksson and Sophia’s father join the boats salvaging crates from the Gulf of Finland; by dawn, the makeshift fleet has dispersed and the sea is empty again. Elsewhere in the summer, a severe heatwave makes the island’s water shortage urgent, and Sophia’s father brings an enormous plastic container to carry water from a bog. Such episodes show the household depending on movement across water and on labor beyond its immediate domestic space. The August withdrawal changes that pattern: boats and equipment are secured, while the household prepares for a stretch in which the family will not be living there.

Yet the seasonal emptiness is never presented as complete or permanent. Grandmother keeps returning to the possibility of strangers, shipwrecked people, birds, and the family’s own spring arrival. Even the landscape’s apparent recovery is qualified by the tools left ready, the wood stacked for use, the preserved room, and the objects deliberately kept in place. The family seeks to remove its traces without making the island inhospitable to life. In this balance, The island’s return to an uninhabited state is less a clean erasure than a carefully managed pause: human presence recedes, the weather and landscape take over, and the preparations themselves keep open the possibility of return.