I lift my lamp beside the golden door
what a tiny Norwegian island can teach the US on the Fourth of July
Preamble
Last year, a story found me in my living room in Massachusetts, and I chased it to an island off the coast of Norway.
It was my first foray into journalism. I spent the next six months pitching the story to various outlets to no avail. I revised the living daylights out of it. One outlet, who I won’t name here, wanted to publish it – but, when editing time rolled around, they pushed me to reframe it in a way that felt both disingenuous and unkind to the story’s subjects. So I backed out.
I’ll never know for sure why the piece gained so little traction, although I have my theories. Regardless, after my umpteenth rejection, I declared the piece a wash. Let it be an account of a marvelous adventure for my grandkids to read someday. I shelved it and redirected my efforts toward my other obligations: grad school, copyediting my book, and problem drinking.
One year later, the American people have (re)elected their favorite autocrat, and he has deployed his legion of goons to terrorize and deport immigrants and refugees. Not that this is anything new for the American government, whose track record on both sides of the aisle is despicable. National borders earn their legitimacy from violence, or at least the threat of violence. This is simply a vile expansion of the status quo.
We are supposed to celebrate America today, but America has drifted so far from the values it claims to espouse in its national mythos. I’m publishing this story today because Utsira is living the values that America once claimed as its own.
Early one February morning, fifteen year old Mykhailo Luchko woke up to explosions. He thought that a truck had tipped over, or maybe there had been an accident at the nearby steelworks. He checked the news and couldn’t believe what he saw: Russia had invaded his home city of Mariupol, Ukraine.
Mykhailo kept calm – sanguine, even. He started a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with his ten year old brother, Viktor, and their mother and stepfather. The electricity in their neighborhood, the 23rd Microdistrict, began to falter. The lights went out and came back on at random intervals until they flickered out and never returned. The gas, water and heat followed. They finished the jigsaw puzzle by candlelight.
“After that,” Mykhailo said, “everything became hardcore.”
He flashes a puckish smile. He smiles because nothing is hardcore where we sit on the island of Utsira, fifteen kilometers off the coast of Norway. Mykhailo smiles at the dissonance of remembering explosions and gunshots and power outages while watching the sunset turn flocks of seabirds into silhouettes, the ocean rocking the fishing boats to sleep.
Utsira is far from Ukraine, yet their histories are now inextricably linked. Of Utsira’s two hundred residents, twenty nine are Ukrainian refugees, making the island an unlikely cultural enclave: the most Ukrainian place in Norway, and one of the most Ukrainian places in western Europe.
I came to Utsira to understand how this came to be – how twenty nine Ukrainians found themselves a home an hour away from the nearest stoplight, and how the new neighbors were getting along at the periphery of a nation that has historically struggled to accept immigrants.
Back in Mariupol, in the first weeks of the war, Mykhailo’s family rationed their food and drinking water. Mykhailo walked around the apartment in three pairs of pants, five sweaters, and a winter coat. He waited to hear from the other half of his family: his father Yevhen Luchko, his stepmother Kateryna Rakhuba, and his five year old half brother, Yehor. Yevhen, Kateryna and Yehor lived in the 23rd Microdistrict as well, just fifteen minutes on foot from Mykhailo and Viktor under normal conditions.
On the tenth of March, Russian forces shelled the neighborhood, shattering one of the windows of Mykhailo’s apartment. He and his family hung a bedsheet over its empty frame to block wind and shrapnel. Through the empty window, they watched the adjacent apartment building burn. Mykhailo heard a child shout for help over and over, then fall silent. By the next morning, the building was a scorched shell, devoid of life.
Mykhailo decided to document the situation. He recorded voice memos on his phone. “War, March 11, Friday, eight AM, 2022, Mariupol, Ukraine,” he said in the first memo. Then he paused to record what could be mistaken for thunder. Still no word from his father.
At lunchtime the next day, the bedsheet fell from the empty window. As Mykhailo hung it back up, there was a great explosion. A shell had flown into his building. The whole family ran to the rear wall as the remaining windows shattered, spraying the apartment with fine shards of glass.
Nearly two weeks later, Mykhailo’s father finally managed to contact him and Viktor. He said that he would be able to come get them, and together they could leave Mariupol. Mykhailo and Viktor rejoiced, but they were faced with a difficult decision: head into the unknown with their father and little brother in search of safety, or stay with their mother and try to survive in the only home they had ever known.
“We ate twice today,” said Mykhailo in the next voice memo. “Our breath is visible in the air.”
On the twenty fifth of March, the Luchko family escaped Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy. They left with only their passports and whatever they managed to fit into their car.
Meanwhile, fifteen hundred miles northwest of the violence, Utsira mayor Marte Eide Klovning worried about the fate of her own community.
Utsira, the smallest of Norway’s 357 municipalities, is one of the thousands of islands that glaciers that scraped free from the Norwegian mainland millennia ago. The island is just over two square miles, but less than half of that area is inhabited – or habitable, in any practical sense. Most of the terrain is bare and rocky; all of Utsira’s inhabitants live in a slender green valley that runs through the center of the island, connecting the northern harbor to the southern. The valley is just over a thousand feet wide, lush with wildflowers, vegetable gardens, and wayward flocks of sheep.
Four times a day, a free car ferry connects Utsira to the mainland. The journey takes just over an hour, bringing passengers past seabird colonies, seaweed-bearded skerries, and planes about to land at the airport on the nearby island of Karmøy. The ferry is Utsira’s only access to the outside world. A doctor takes the ferry to Utsira once every two weeks.
For centuries, Utsira was a fishing community that thrived off of herring and cod.
“The men were all fishermen,” said Marit Klovning, the mayor’s mother, “and the women worked mostly at home.”
After World War II, Utsira’s fishing industry brought the island’s population to a peak of 433. But the North Atlantic fish stocks dwindled, and both of the island’s fish docks had shut down by the 1980s. The majority of Utsira’s fishing fleet was deliberately sunk and now lies at the bottom of a neighboring fjord, catching nothing but barnacles.
With the herring and cod gone, the population plummeted. By the year 2000, it had fallen to 250. But Mayor Klovning says that 250 was a comfortable number. There were just enough hands to keep the island running.
Klovning is an unusual mayor, perfectly suited to the unusual community she governs. A mother of three, she has lived on Utsira all her life, except for a short stint in Oslo, where she studied to become a librarian. In her twenties, she was elected deputy mayor, then mayor. Now forty, she works part-time at Utsira’s one-room library in addition to her mayoral duties. A community as small as Utsira demands that everyone pitch in where they can, even the mayor.
Utsira’s isolation and small population can be strengths. Islanders tend to trust one another; homes are left unlocked, children roam the island freely, and every household on Utsira has a key to the swimming pool. Coronavirus didn’t reach Utsira for two years.
But the island’s population continued to decline throughout Mayor Klovning’s tenure, as islanders moved to the mainland in search of work. Klovning estimates that only one third of the youth who leave Utsira to pursue further education eventually return home.
When Utsira’s population fell below 200 for the first time in its history, the community’s needs began to go unfulfilled. There weren’t enough children attending its kindergarten and school.
“People don’t move to Utsira without a job,” Mayor Klovning told me, “so there are few free hands here. My husband has always complained that there is no workforce to help him.”
The mayor’s husband, Anders Myklebost, owns one of Utsira’s two restaurants, Dalanaustet, which is housed in a repurposed herring saltery. “We can’t hire someone part-time here,” Myklebost said. “People don’t move out to Utsira for part-time work.”
Since the fishing bust, Utsira has attempted a number of initiatives to create jobs, attract new residents, and keep the ones it already has.
Odd stands of Sitka spruce mottle the otherwise bare island — the last vestiges of an ill-conceived lumber scheme in the 1960s and 1970s. The world’s first hydrogen windmill operated on Utsira, but was shut down in 2008. The Norwegian government has approved the construction of a 140-turbine wind farm in the North Sea one nautical mile west of Utsira – a Faustian bargain that will create an estimated fifty jobs at the expense of Utsira’s sunset.
More recently, Utsira has begun marketing itself as a tourist destination. Utsira is home to Norway’s highest lighthouse, which stands on a pile of rocks at seventy eight meters above sea level, and the islanders are proud of it. The municipal YouTube channel features a video promoting the island: wildflowers trembling in the sea breeze, a delighted little boy holding a langoustine, and at least four angles of the lighthouse. On the ferry, a sign greets passengers with Utsira’s coat of arms: alternating spokes of blue and white that symbolize the lighthouse illuminating the dark.
“Utsira,” the sign reads, “a community in the wind.”
None of these initiatives have successfully reversed Utsira’s population decline. By 2022, the number of islanders fell to a nadir of 188.
“We didn’t have enough hands to manage our society,” said Mayor Klovning. “It was hard, because it was always the same people contributing to everything.”
Utsira was no longer just the smallest of Norway’s municipalities; it had become the fastest disappearing.
Every night on Utsira, I woke up to the wind as it whipped through the island’s valley. It sounded nothing like any wind I had heard before – on the Norwegian mainland, in Ukraine, or in my native New England. Utsira’s wind more closely resembled a chorus of screams, the howl of ghosts.
After fleeing Mariupol, the Luchko family arrived in the neighboring seaside city of Berdyansk. There, Ukrainian volunteers gave them food and clothes. It was too dangerous to travel further. Berdyansk is also occupied by Russia, but it wasn’t under siege at the time.
A week later, a break in the fighting allowed the Luchkos to travel further from the front lines. They drove north from Berdyansk to the city of Dnipro, where they stayed for three weeks with Kateryna’s colleagues while they considered their next move.
The Luchko family had lived well in Mariupol. Yevhen worked for Tedis-Ukraine, the nation’s largest tobacco distributor. Kateryna was the chief economist of Mariupol’s local credit union. They had started to build their dream house.
“And then our lives were cut like plants with the roots left behind in the soil,” Kateryna told me as she recounted her family’s journey over coffee at Utsira’s town hall.
The Luchkos had never imagined living anywhere but Ukraine. Instead of emigrating, they moved to the western Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr. Yevhen and Kateryna rented an apartment and enrolled the boys in school. As Russian forces leveled their hometown, the Luchko family attempted to rebuild their lives.
In spring of 2022, the Rogaland County government on the mainland contacted Mayor Klovning about resettling Ukrainian refugees. Utsira had never been asked to resettle refugees before, not even during the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis. Utsira was too small, too remote to serve refugees’ needs.
“They thought we couldn’t handle it,” Mayor Klovning told me with a smirk.
This time was different. Norway had never received such a large volume of refugees in a single year. Now every municipality of Norway, no matter how small, would have to pitch in. The county government said that Utsira would be expected to accept five.
“We had a debate here,” said Klovning. “How much capacity do we have? How many Ukrainians can we take? Because we thought that five was too little. Five sounded so small. How much difference does that make?”
Utsira’s municipal council met and discussed a larger number. They settled on fifteen Ukrainian refugees, and then twenty. Then Municipality Executive May Britt Jensen said: “No, we can take thirty.”
“First, I thought, ‘Whoa, that’s too much,’” said Klovning. “But then I said ‘Okay, it can work. We have room and we have people. We’ll just contribute as we can.’”
The municipal council’s vote was unanimous: Utsira would welcome thirty refugees.
Although Zhytomyr lay far from the front lines, the air raid sirens were nearly constant. Each time the sirens sounded, the Luchkos had to flee to the basement. The boys split their time between two basements: their school basement and the basement of their apartment building.
Power outages followed the Luchkos from Mariupol to Zhytomyr. They became longer and more frequent until life without electricity became the Luchkos’ new normal.
In October 2022, in a terrifying instance of déjà vu, a missile attack shattered the windows of their new apartment.
“The lights were out,” Kateryna told me, “there was no electricity, the kids weren’t going to school – and I said ‘no’.”
Kateryna and Yehor had friends from Mariupol who had left Ukraine and sought protection in Norway. The Norwegian government had placed them on an island in the North Sea called Utsira.
“I looked at the map on my phone,” Kateryna said, “and thought ‘We’re ready to go start new lives on an island, somewhere quiet and safe where my children will never have to hide in another basement.’”
Under martial law, men aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine, but the Ukrainian government makes an exception for men with three or more minor children. Kateryna and Yevhen presented the border service with their children’s birth certificates and received their permission documents. That week, the family of five drove west out of Ukraine and into the unknown.
The night before the first family arrived, May Britt Jensen says she barely slept.
“We were afraid that we couldn’t give Ukrainians enough,” said Mayor Klovning, “so we expected that some of them would leave for other places in Norway where there would be more possibilities. We are aware that this is not Oslo.”
When Ukrainian refugees arrive in Norway, they must go straight to the National Arrival Centre in the small town of Råde. The National Arrival Centre is a squat, wide building on the berm of a highway between a McDonald’s and a motorcycle dealership. There, they register with the police, who fingerprint them, take their passports, and issue them registration certificates as asylum seekers. They can choose to stay in Råde or at similar reception centers scattered throughout Norway, where they will sleep in a tent hall, receive three meals a day, and await placement in a community.
Typically, refugees cannot choose where they are placed. After five hours on hold, a representative from the Immigration Directorate told me that “to the extent possible, we take into account close family or a need for health-related follow-ups,” but that “[we] must ensure a managed, dispersed, fast and accurate settlement.”
Ukrainian refugees can also contact a particular municipality on their own with a request to be resettled there. When the Luchko family arrived in Norway, they contacted Utsira’s municipal government and asked to be resettled there so they could live close to their friends. Their request was granted.
It was cold and windy when the Luchko family drove off the ferry. Islanders stood waiting for them in front of the town hall, holding flowers. All were smiling. Atop the town hall’s flagpole, the flags of Ukraine and Norway flew together.
“They said ‘welcome!’,” said Kateryna, “and then I started to cry.”
The municipality had prepared a semi-detached home for the Luchko family to live in. Their immediate neighbors were an elderly Ukrainian couple.
“It was so weird when we first came to Utsira,” said Yehor, who was five at the time. “I didn’t understand anything. It was all different. There were no trees and a lot of wind.”
The Luchko family enrolled in Utsira’s full-time refugee introduction program. Deputy Mayor Tove Helen Grimsby coordinated the program until she had to take on extra duties at the primary school, where she is also a classroom teacher; then Katrine Klovning, the island’s churchwarden and Mayor Klovning’s sister, took over. Their mother Marit, a retired teacher, ran adult education classes in Norwegian language and culture.
Marit is a poised woman who speaks impeccable English with a touch of Received Pronunciation. In addition to grammar and vocabulary, she taught her new Ukrainian neighbors to cook traditional Norwegian meatballs and pastries.
“They were eager to speak and learn,” said Marit, “so they made progress quickly.” Multiple Ukrainians on Utsira pursued extra Norwegian language tutoring, often on their own dime.
Ukrainian refugees in Norway don’t typically begin working right away; they attend the refugee introduction program full-time and then find a job.
“But we have it a little bit different on Utsira,” said Katrine. “From day one here, they start working. They have two days a week of work, three days a week of school.”
“People asked me, ‘How will you get jobs for these Ukrainians?’” said Mayor Klovning. “‘There are no jobs out there.’ But it’s interesting how they just find their own place. There are Ukrainians all over the island now. In the restaurant, in the shops.”
Kateryna now works as a receptionist at the town hall. While I spoke with the mayor, Kateryna sat beside us, switching effortlessly between Russian, Ukrainian and Norwegian.
Yevhen works at the island’s grocery store, Joker. Joker is owned by Klovning’s brother, Kjetil. Yevhen works the cash register and makes sukhari, Ukrainian croutons, which have proven popular with the islanders.
Six days a week, both the town hall and Joker function as community gathering places, warm and bright spaces where islanders huddle together and weather the island’s many dark and windy days. The town hall also houses Utsira’s bank, public library, health center and nursing home, occupied by a single pair of elderly brothers. The grocery store is the island’s cafe, souvenir shop, post office and Vietnamese restaurant. In addition to Norwegian pastries and Ukrainian croutons, Utsira’s sole Vietnamese resident works there cooking and selling chả giò, fried egg rolls.
When I arrived on Utsira, I realized that Joker was closed until Monday, leaving me without food for the next thirty eight hours. Yevhen called Kjetil to unlock the shop so I could purchase what I needed. As I filled a basket with ingredients, Yevhen gently chided me for coming to Utsira so poorly prepared.
“When you come back,” he said, “bring warmer clothes.”
Mykhailo, now seventeen, attends high school and has found a girlfriend. On Thursdays, he volunteers at the local youth center in the nearby city of Haugesund. There, he runs a game of Mafia, a role-playing game that’s wildly popular among Ukrainian youth. He is fluent in Norwegian and learning to speak in Utsira’s dialect – to become a local. He also helps organize the local Diversity Festival.
The local media has taken notice of his energy, the untamed optimism he radiates. One YouTube video shows him interviewing, then hugging, the mayor of Haugesund.
“Everyone is cheerful and positive here,” he says. “It’s a completely different upbringing and mentality.”
Yehor has become friends with Lars-Jakob, Mayor Klovning’s son; during the summer, when the sun doesn’t set until nearly midnight, they spend hours on the trampoline together.
Viktor, a passionate soccer player who has his sights set on a career with Real Madrid, is grateful that Utsira has a football pitch. When the weather allows, he plays soccer with the other Victor on Utsira – Katrine’s son.
The three boys keep in close contact with family members who still live in Mariupol: Mykhailo and Viktor’s mother and stepfather. After the Luchko family fled, the Siege of Mariupol continued for nearly three more months, destroying ninety percent of the city. Corpses littered the city streets and piled up in mass graves. Russian forces kidnapped and forcibly repatriated thousands of Mariupol's children. The world likely does not yet know the actual quantity and severity of the atrocities Russia has committed in Mariupol, as Russia continues to occupy the city.
Mariupol fades from the younger boys’ memories a little more each day. Viktor says that what he remembers of his hometown is mostly “bombs and burning and blackness”, and that Utsira is “the most beautiful place”.
In their free time, Utsira’s children – who are disproportionately boys, noted Mayor Klovning – roam in a single pack. They migrate on foot and on bicycles from the football pitch to the swimming pool, from the grocery store to the ‘beach’, a meager strip of imported sand where daring and masochistic islanders can take a frigid dip in the North Sea.
“Even if your child is out and you don’t have one hundred percent control,” Klovning told me, “there is always someone here watching out for your kids. We grew up here and we felt free, but always safe, because we knew everyone.”
“It takes a village to raise a child,” said Katrine, “and we have that.”
Each time I encountered the children of Utsira, they waved to me and shouted “Hei – pryvit!” – greeting me in both Norwegian and Ukrainian, much like Montreal’s notorious “bonjour-hi”. Utsira’s Ukrainian children have learned Norwegian, but Utsira’s Norwegian children are also proud to show off their new Ukrainian skills.
There is a social contract on Utsira that people greet each other as they pass each other on the road. Children and adults, pedestrians and motorists, relatives and strangers alike, everyone gets a smile, a wave, and a greeting in Norwegian, Ukrainian or English. This norm is the opposite of the Norwegian mainland, where greeting a stranger will earn you a skeptical, frosty glare.
“Hei – pryvit!” one stray child called to me as I walked to the Joker. “Come look at my crabs!”
The boy, who looked about six, brought me a pail with three slippery brown crabs jousting in the bottom. He lifted one out of the pail and placed it on his head, where it fit like a yarmulke.
“What are you going to do with them?” I asked.
He looked at me as if the question was patently ridiculous, as if I was the one with a crab on my head. “They’re dinner.”
Later that day, when I encountered Viktor and Victor kicking around a soccer ball in the middle of the island’s only road, I struck up a conversation.
“What’s the difference between Ukrainian kids and Norwegian kids?” I asked.
“There’s no difference,” said Victor Klovning. “We’re exactly the same.”
“No, Norwegian kids talk back to their teachers,” said Viktor Luchko. “They aren’t afraid.”
“What do you want Americans to know about Utsira?” I asked.
“It’s small on the map,” Viktor Luchko told me, “but this place is big. We have everything you need. A school, a town hall, a shop.”
“It’s a really great place,” Victor Klovning said. “It’s basically one big family.”
Utsira may be one big family, but it now hosts two distinct cultures.
“The Norwegian and Ukrainian mentalities are different,” Kateryna told me. “Different languages, traditions, how we interact. When we invite each other over, we don’t always understand – are they just inviting us, are the kids invited too? In Ukraine, when we invite guests over, we sit for a while and enjoy each other’s company. Here in Norway, if you’re invited from four to five PM, you stay from four to five PM.”
“One year ago,” said Mayor Klovning, “there was a little bit of negativity, because four families came in four months. People were stressed out because they didn’t know their neighbors. But it came from a good place. They want to say hello.”
I arrived on Utsira during their annual Pride celebrations. There are two openly gay islanders, but the majority of the island marches in the parade, which is followed by a karaoke night and drag show at the restaurant, Dalanaustet. Ukraine is a more conservative society than Norway, and multiple islanders, Norwegian and Ukrainian alike, alluded to tensions around Pride.
I sat outside of the Joker with Joakim Lund, principal of Utsira’s primary school, as we split a box of freshly fried chả giò and chatted. Every few minutes, one of Joakim’s students would pass by and greet us.
“It seems like you know everyone here,” I said.
Joakim nodded. “I do know everyone here. I know all the kids, I know all their parents, I know all their grandparents.”
Joakim is originally from Haugesund, on the mainland.
“When I took a job on Utsira,” he told me, “people thought I was crazy.”
“Were you crazy?” I asked.
He considered his answer for a moment.
“A little bit,” he said. “Yes, I am a little bit crazy, one might say.”
Over the years, Utsira has become Joakim’s muse. In addition to working as a school principal, he is an electronic musician who recently released an ambient track called “Utsira”.
“The island,” he says, “has a magic presence.”
Utsira’s primary school has twenty seven students. Twenty two are Norwegian and five are Ukrainian.
“It has been both easy and difficult,” said Joakim, “because they automatically just relate to their own language. And they make a Ukrainian clique. I think it’s been such a shock for them to come to a brand new country. And they also escaped war, which adds an element. But we have been working a lot with integrating them. Now they mix quite well. Kids manage to play around the language barrier.”
Twenty nine Ukrainians now live on Utsira. They work at Utsira’s kindergarten, primary school, grocery store, town hall, with the local carpenter, and at the Dalanaustet restaurant, where Mayor Klovning’s husband finally has enough employees. None of the Ukrainians have moved off the island. Ukrainians comprise about 1% of Norway’s population but 14.4% of Utsira’s.
“They are already just a part of us,” said Mayor Klovning. “They see that this is a small community where everyone is needed. It’s a strength for our society that we have them here.”
“What do you want Americans to know about Utsira?” I asked.
“I hope that they see that Ukrainians here give back,” said Klovning. “That they contribute to this society. That we need them as much as they need us. I hope they feel that.”
On my last day on Utsira, the Fourth of July, I hiked to the fabled lighthouse. A stout red brick structure atop a pile of rocks, the most remarkable aspect of the lighthouse was that it was the windiest place I had ever been.
From the lighthouse, I considered what the future holds for Utsira. What if the influx of Ukrainians was just a Band-Aid on Utsira’s existential wound? What if Victor and Viktor grow up and move to the mainland, and Utsira’s population resumes its decline until it’s a floating ghost town?
That afternoon, Yevhen showed me some of the side projects he had been pursuing with his sons around the island. Outside of the valley, Yevhen and Viktor had built boardwalks over the rocky terrain so more of Utsira’s nature could be explored on foot.
Horrified to learn that I had never been fishing, Yevhen and Kateryna took me out on their boat. They piloted the boat away from Utsira’s southern harbor, past guillemots perched on the narrow ledges of gabbro shoals, until we reached a spot where they had caught a full string of mackerel last weekend. The sea was unusually still, which augured poorly for our catch, according to Yevhen. Webs of sunlight danced on the surface of the water.
Yevhen and Kateryna told me that they used to go fishing in Mariupol. They had a small boat, and in their free time, they took it out into the Sea of Azov to catch perch and bream. When they first arrived on Utsira, they repaired one of the island’s many disused motorboats so they could go fishing again.
Yevhen showed me how to bait the hook. He took my arms and shoulders, demonstrating how to cast. After a few minutes, I felt a tug. I reeled the line in too enthusiastically; whatever had bitten had broken free and swum off, and I nearly stabbed Kateryna with the lure as it flew out of the water. As Yevhen untangled my line, shaking his head and laughing, I became acutely aware that I was only a few years older than his eldest son.
They had hoped for more mackerel this time, but we returned to shore with just two silvery pollocks in our pail, each the size of my forearm.
“I think I scared the mackerel off,” I told Yevhen.
“It’s not you,” said Yevhen. “It’s the nice weather.”
The sun was setting, and a white light flared from Utsira’s highest point, sweeping across the sky, guiding us home. For the first time, I understood the islanders’ love for their lighthouse. It was a fitting symbol of their island, broadcasting its welcome far and wide across the sea. Give me your tired, your poor…
Yevhen and Kateryna left both pollocks with their Norwegian neighbor, who was disabled and couldn’t go fishing himself.
“That’s generous,” I said.
Kateryna shook her head.
“To us,” she said, “these two hundred people are family. I can be sure of this.”
Sam, this is so good! Why would anyone NOT want to publish this?? The world (and the U.S. especially) is just broken. But it has a good lighthouse in you.
This was lovely! The only somewhat annoying thing is that I have now a strong compulsion to move there, as it sounds like a piece of heaven.