THE GARDEN OF EDEN
... at some point something must have come from nothing ...
Sophie Amundsen was on her way home from school. She had walked the first part of
the way with Joanna. They had been discussing robots. Joanna thought the human
brain was like an advanced computer. Sophie was not certain she agreed. Surely a
person was more than a piece of hardware?
When they got to the supermarket they went their separate ways. Sophie lived on the
outskirts of a sprawling suburb and had almost twice as far to school as Joanna. There
were no other houses beyond her garden, which made it seem as if her house lay at the
end of the world. This was where the woods began.
She turned the corner into Clover Close. At the end of the road there was a sharp bend,
known as Captain's Bend. People seldom went that way except on the weekend.
It was early May. In some of the gardens the fruit trees were encircled with dense clusters of daffodils. The birches were already in pale green leaf.
It was extraordinary how everything burst forth at this time of year! What made this
great mass of green vegetation come welling up from the dead earth as soon as it got
warm and the last traces of snow disappeared?
As Sophie opened her garden gate, she looked in the mailbox. There was usually a lot
of junk mail and a few big envelopes for her mother, a pile to dump on the kitchen
table before she went up to her room to start her homework.
From time to time there would be a few letters from the bank for her father, but then
he was not a normal father. Sophie's father was the captain of a big oil tanker, and was
away for most of the year. During the few weeks at a time when he was at home, he
would shuffle around the house making it nice and cozy for Sophie and her mother.
But when he was at sea he could seem very distant.
There was only one letter in the mailbox--and it was for Sophie. The white envelope
read: "Sophie Amundsen, 3 Clover Close." That was all; it did not say who it was
from. There was no stamp on it either.