Memories of the childhood, running wild, AND free, having a TON of fun outdoors, where is that these days now, I wonder??? Translated…
Finding a Patch of Green Was Like Winning the Lotto, Setting the Cattle to Pastures, Chasing the Dragonflies, Capturing the Cicadas
from the papers…
I’d lived on a hilltop when I was younger, my family planted fruits. Back then there were no advanced machineries for planting, everything became reliant on manpower, my parents busied about all year long, the five of us sisters would shoulder our separate shares of household and farming chores, other than going to school, cooking, gathering the firewood, feeding the livestock, the chickens, pulling the weeds, tending to the livestock, gathering up the oranges from the trees………we’d not, had a minute of spare time to ourselves, but, children are naturally playful, and, we were always able to, find something fun to do, in the midst of our work.
At the start of the summers, setting the livestock to pasture became the duties of my third youngest sister and I, who was in the second grade back then, every morning as the sun came up, the two of us would take the livestock out of the pens, and, find the grasses all over the places. We were the only family that still kept the cows then, and, finding a full-grown patch of pasture isn’t as easy as we’d imagined, because as we looked, there were, trees and forests of bamboos, or that there are, the fruit farms. And so, when there’s that distant patch of green that appeared before us, spreading out, like a rug, alongside the creeks, my younger sister and I acted like we’d just won the lotto, ran so wild and excitedly, all over the pastures, sang and danced along; and, the cow seemed to have been infected by our joys to, and, she’d replied to our ecstasy by lifting up her head, and mooed along.
not my photo…
We’d chosen a tree, tied the cows’ leads to the branches, and, setting the leads as long as we possibly can get them, so the cows can monitor themselves as they’d grazed, and we’d not needed to watch them constantly, and have more time to play.
There are not only just numerous trees up that hill, creeks too. And, there would be a lot of dragonflies that flew all over the skies next to the creeks, my sister and I picked up a small twig, and the bamboo leaves, and made them into a broom, chased the dragonflies; under the sun, our shadows grew shorter by the minute, and our cheeks became redder and redder, we’d bent ourselves, held our knees, and couldn’t stop panting, we’d found a hiding place in the forests, the shaded areas. The cicadas would call out endlessly, w4e’d tiptoed to underneath that tree, and, as the cicadas go so into their songs, they’d not realized, that we were, behind them at all. Wed’ also found, a really amazing tree, crawling with the Japanese rhinoceros beetles, we’d captured the males, taken them home, tied a string onto its horn, and, the other end, onto the longan trees, allowing it to fly within the radiuses. As we got older, we’d realized, that that tree was the food source for the rhinoceros beetles, that they lived off of the saps.
not my photograph…
The Heat was Coming in the Summers, We’d Gone into the Creeks and the Streams to Cool Ourselves Off, to Catch the Shrimps, the Fish, and See What’s There, Hidden Beneath the Rocks
With the heat rising by the days, we’d slowly, lost interests in catching the insects, and, we’d turned our attention to the cooling streams and creeks close by. The water passed through the aromatic floral pastures, passed through the rocks in the valley, and, started, pouring down loudly, from the higher parts, making these small scaled waterfalls and several greenish ponds; the ponds weren’t at all that deep, the water only got to our waists, the riverbeds were paved with agates and sand, so clear we could see the shrimps and the fish swimming. But, the moment we set our feet in, the mud and the sand were roused up, the water became opaque, and so, we could only, stand so still, waited for the water to return back to its crystal clarity, then, we were, capturing the fish and the shrimps.
At first, we’d not known the behaviors of the fishes and shrimp, seeing the shrimp swimming toward us leisurely, we’d immediately made a bowl with our hands, and tried to scoop it up, but, before we were able to lift up our hands into mid-air, the shrimp had, escaped. Slowly, we’d observed that the shrimp would bounce backward when they feel threatened, my sister and I would quietly, wait by the back for them.
One autumn, my father split up the assets with my uncles, and that cow that was ours for a while was given to my uncle. On an early winter morn, I’d stood, dumbfounded by the doorway, watching my uncle, led the cow away on that small passage out front, farther, and farther off, I’d felt, that a part of my childhood went away with them too.
The children don’t stay sad for long, as the heat from the sun was reduced a little each and every day, the winters which were most leisurely for the farming community arrived, and my father’s moods lightened up too, he’d no longer restricted us in our play anymore, and, the sorrows of the loss of our cow was then, replaced, by the running wild and free into the woods, up the mountains, of our childhood years.
So, this, is remembering one’s own childhood, and, there were, so many, great memories that you’d had in your childhoods, because there weren’t that many restrictions on you to buckle down and study hard, no cram school sessions, no worries of not making the high enough grade on the exams, just living from day to day. That, is the perfect picture of someone’s childhood, because childhood should BE wild and free like this, with no worries, and just filled with the experiences in nature.
Life, the Obstacle Course 