(…a little anticipatory, I can say that the attempted kitchen garden indeed yielded nothing. Was the failure because of the loam, or the doubt annulled any possibility for a success?.
And, what is really inconceivable, why was to start it at all? To save costs for potatoes? But we were not so poor then. In the parents’ room there appeared a fold-out couch-bed, two armchairs with lacquered armrests of wood, and a three-legged coffee table, all of them making one furniture set.
Probably, they simply wanted to take a break from all that furniture and the farming enterprise served an excuse for fleeing to the forest…)
~ ~ ~
And again it was summer only this time it started much earlier than in all the previous years. And together with that summer, the Rechka river rushed into my life. Or maybe, the limits of my living space had expanded enough to reach it.
To start the relations with the Rechka, at first, I needed a company of boys more advanced in their years who led along the downhill road avoiding the heat-softened tar in the joints, which leg I knew well though from my frequenting the Detachment’s Library. Then forked an unknown footpath thru the shady thicket over a steep slope until there, all at once, unfurled the sparkling sunlit stream of the Rechka lapping among innumerable boulders of any size.
You could cross the ten-meter-wide river without getting deeper than to your waist or you might stand instead knee-deep in its fast current and watch a school of translucent whitebait poking ticklishly at your ankles in the greenish twilight of the incessantly rolling mass of water…
When out of the river, we played Key-or-lock, betting on the form of the splash made by a stone hurled into the water. If the splash rose up like a stick, that was counted “a key”, while a wider, bush-like, splash went for “lock”. In controversy cases, the last word remained by the boy who played football better, or whose pebble did more leaps at “baking pancakes” over the water surface… Soon I began to go to the Rechka alone or with just one partner, yet on the river bank we parted because our main concern was fishing.
All the tackle consisted of a fishing pole—a cut-down willow whip—with a length of line tied to the thinner end. The line was threaded thru the float and ended with the hook, accompanied by a tiny lead sinker. The float could be made of a brownish wine cork, a match stuck into the same hole by side the threaded line fixed its length from the hook, or you could use a float bought from the Sports Goods store—a plucked and pared goose feather painted red-and-white with 2 tiny rubber rings to keep it fixed on the line—they both popped equally well on the rushing ripples of rapid current, or turned thoughtfully still in a small backwater pockets behind the bigger boulders…