I want to tell you about the happiest days of my life.
It took me decades to realise that I may call my grandparents' household a home. Regardless of how far and how often I visit it. It was a long journey of self-discovery. But back then I was too dumb to think it over.
I felt harmony there – with people, nature, relatives, even poultry. We would go fishing, take a ride on a cart pulled by two horses, or watch Tour de France on Eurosport, using the antenna which only received two soviet channels a few years before.
I lost a tiny silver cross there – a truly precious thing in those days. Never seen such a symbol where Jesus was so generic – with the body soldered out of a single wire and an egg-shaped head with no details. Still, his figure was tense and emotional, resembling more an astronaut or a robot from the futuristic works of Hajime Sorayama.
It was a year when I also experienced the enormous grief of human loss for the first time, not of a relative, a friend or even a pet, but of a stranger who died in a horrific racing accident.
Yet probably it was the time then when I indeed experienced freedom in my mind and my body. I explored every corner of the house and could have mapped every single spiderweb if needed. Maybe there was another factor. Still a teen, I lost any interest in my first crush and was about to move to a new school in the autumn (where finally saw a peer weaker than me).
I was a nasty asshole to animals before, thinking they could have fun playing with me. But each time I caught a duckling, it experienced only suffer. But that summer, I stopped chasing birds and teasing the pig.
The household is abandoned now. Some walls are about to fall. No chickens mean a lot of grass in the yard. But I rejoiced indeed when I saw the place for the first time in two years after the funeral. Not the best place to settle in for a middle-aged chap yet still so emotional!
It is full of wildlife now – birds, hedgehogs, even foxes. And the trees are so grown up – almost tripled in height since that happiest year. They reach out for the sun as that generic Jesus-astronaut.
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