Status Updates From Bunte Steine

Finally getting around to reading this because I cracked open the new Sebald essay collection and the first piece is on Stifter so I need to #dothework

Cat-silver: (is this supposed to be mica?)
A family befriends a wild girl. She saves their lives twice. She joins the family for years before inexplicably fleeing and never returns.

A truly bizarre story.

Shoemaker weds a girl from the next mountain pass. His town treats her & their son and a daughter as outsiders because they go back and forth over the pass to see their grandparents. On Christmas Eve the kids gets lost in a snowstorm while returning from their grandparents' village. They see beautiful and terrifying things and survive the night. The townspeople search out & rescue them. Then the 3 are accepted.

And the woman takes the girl in. She discovers it is the same pair who disappeared. A search is made for the mother (why?!) which turns up nothing. The woman and her husband help educate the girl and take care of her finances until she is of age. It happened a long time before the narrator was alive. Everyone is dead. It is a sad and pointless tale.

Tourmaline: Now this was a weird one. It rambled on and on for much too long. Man's wife has an affair with his friend. She confesses to the husband. A few months later she disappears. Then, a few months after that, the man takes their daughter and also disappears. More than a decade passes and a woman becomes acquainted with a man and his teenage daughter. The man dies from falling off of a ladder...

And years with the friends meeting again in person only once. Upon his death the will is opened and his secret wish is revealed.

Limestone: a young suveryer befriends a rural parson while scouting the area several months. He learns to see the beauty in a place most call barren. Their friendship endures through letters after the young man continues on his way to survey new lands but before he leaves the parson asks him to carry a sealed copy of his will and have it opened by the court in the event of his death. The parson lives on for years...

Granite: a story in a story. A boy gets in trouble and his grandfather brings him on a long hike to get him out of his mother's wrath and tells him about the time of his grandfather and the plague in the village.