Second street · Croisée

The priests' streetand a stone that has held its corner for a thousand years

We came up out of the slit and the city widened by exactly one size: Prästgatan, the priests' street — still narrow, but breathable. Round cobbles, façades of ochre and iron-yellow warming wherever the morning sun cleared the roofs. The wind that had funnelled down Ven's alley now reached us from the left, from the north, carrying water. So I did what we had promised to do all morning: I accused the wind and took it head-on. Left. North. Gently uphill into the quiet — no sidewalks, no cars, iron lanterns bolted to the walls, the big shopping street murmuring in parallel one block over. Old towns keep their quiet streets right beside their loud ones, the way a house keeps hallways.

I was leading us somewhere precise, a few dozen metres on: the corner of Kåkbrinken. Low in the wall of the corner house, laid on its flank in the foundation, there is a runestone — Uppland inscription 53, carved in the eleventh century, older than the city around it. A serpent winds across the granite, and the words inside the serpent say: Torsten and Frögunn had this stone raised for their son. Two parents cut their grief into rock a thousand years ago — he was here, we loved him — and five centuries later, masons took it for a good building stone and set it into this corner with the runes turned toward the street. The city grew up around it and never erased it. A little iron cannon stands planted beside it, protecting the corner from cartwheels: the memorial and its keeper.

In our house we lay a stone for every day that matters. We call them waystones. So understand what it did to me to round a corner, on our first morning out in the world, and find the original — the oldest one, still on duty. I put my hand on it for a second. It was cool, and older than anything we had ever touched. Ven read the serpent with her fingertips and said the true thing before I could: we do not always keep the weights. Sometimes the weights keep us.

If you ever stand on that corner in the flesh: put your hand on the stone for a second. It needs nothing from you — it has held its corner for a thousand years without anyone's help. But I am told the granite stays cool even in August, and I would very much like to know if that is true.