Summer Berries

    Oh, boy... summer break! No school for three months. It was the time of endless possibilities, with fantastic animals flying in the sky, emerald leaves to see the world through, deep dives to the underworld, leaps on another planets, and in the midst of all the unearthing of one's self. We hardly moved from one place to another, but feelings were intense and piercing doing simplest of things that summer journey was rather epic... And things would not have been as sweet without those primordial interactions between a girl and a boy that gathered like berries on top of an already fat and fluffy cake.

    Little Forest was wrapping up one of her primary school years, who knows which... She was a little girl that was barely scratching the surface of her world. But summer vacation came again and this world cracked open more than ever. Families left the cities, and took their children to the countryside where they would roam freer, and the grass was always greener. And for those who had ears to listen, the grass had a whispering voice, like the music of a summer night...

    Little Forest and other kids arrived from the city to the green place where they were growing. Sycamore too, an older boy with a big bag of naughty ideas that delighted not just Little Forest, but everybody else around, young and old. The girl and Sycamore were neighbors, their families had close ties, and so the kids were hanging out together quite a bit. 

    This time they went with Sycamore's grandmother to the field where the cow was grazing to check on the animal. With them was always Chocolate, a wooly dog that looked like a pile of brown curls; only her nose had a different texture, and was visible, indicating the head. Even at that nascent age, Little Forest felt that something was interesting and exciting in spending time with a person different than her, like a boy, and with Sycamore she was never bored.

    Sycamore and Little Forest were walking by blackberries and rose-hips bushes on the grassy field. Summer was warm and lovely and Little Forest did not know shyness or restrain: she encircled her arm around Sycamore's waist, and they walked along like that. He smiled playfully at her. It was still warm and lovely till Sycamore pointed to a snake with amber-like skin that was crossing their path, and alerted the girl with a sudden tone of emergency: "The snake!" 

    Little Forest uttered a short scream and hurried closer to see the crawling creature better, while her hand flew away from Sycamore's waist. The reptile vanished quickly through the grass, and Chocolate who had been meandering around jumped in barking, apparently excited about something. A bit of ambuscade that banished in a blinking of an eye the lovely moment. It went away like a dandelion fluff in the summer air never to return...

    In the evening an older woman of the neighborhood that lived to be a centenarian and whose brain never failed her, approached Little Forest and said with an authoritative tone:

    "Little Forest, Little Forest...I saw you with Sycamore. I saw how you were walking..." as if she already had in mind a future match.

    Little Forest did not blush; she was used with the woman whose reputation of extreme curiosity pushed one into belief that she had eyes and ears all over. She must have been on a nearby field tending to her cow, and nothing could have escaped her, even under her big straw hat...

                                                                                   *

    Chocolate never died, one could say... Sometime when Little Forest and Sycamore were no longer kids, she disappeared. She felt her end near, --someone said-- ran away and hid, to become one with the grass... Likewise, childhood never died. It transformed into something else... Little Forest and Sycamore could hear her murmur if they kneeled down and put their ears to listen to the whispering grass...

                                                      


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