Now, listen here. I am going to tell you a story that happened up where the clouds cling to the sharp peaks of the mountains, just like sheep’s wool snared on a bramble bush.
High up in the Tyrolean Alps, where the air is so clear you feel as though you could reach out and touch the sky, there lived a watchmaker named Johannes.
He was a small man, quiet and so thin that on windy days he had to put stones in his pockets just to keep from blowing away after the dry leaves. Johannes’s soul was a delicate mechanism, full of tiny cogs and springs, and there was one thing he loved more than anything in the world: the sound of tick-tock. It was the sound of order, the sound of peace.
But, alas! In his own home, there wasn’t a penny’s worth of peace to be found.
Johannes had a wife named Greta. Oh, she was a woman of substance! When she stepped out onto the porch, the sun seemed to hide behind a cloud out of sheer embarrassment. But the trouble wasn’t her stature; it was her voice. Greta didn’t know how to speak — she only knew how to thunder. Her words tumbled down like rocks in a landslide. She scolded Johannes for being too quiet, for breathing too loudly, and even for letting the shadow of his nose fall in the wrong direction.
... 
