Today I am in a narrating mood. But, let me preface the following narrative with some prelude. Lately I’ve read a post of a friend of mine on a social net in which she was reminiscing an event in her days of yore. I might add, parenthetically /ˌpær.ənˈθet.ɪ.kəl.i/ she’s over 90 now. The question she asked her followers was about whether anyone remembered something from the past they wished to forget.
So here I am with a yarn about a very-long-ago incident happened when I was a little girl.
I was shy of 5 years when in 1963 my mum and I stayed in a summer house that my dad would rent every summertime in a village in a Moscow region province. A summer season was ever highly pleasurable and full of amusing children’s events. However, I’d like to mention an extremely awkward scene which was engraved in my memory from that time onwards.
I want to underscore the fact that it was an after-rain day, memorised visually by many puddles on the paths and ground roads. My mum took me to town to do the shopping in order to hoard some food for the following week. We went down the sidewalk along the line of lovely, small, detached houses hidden behind the front gardens, the homes which drowning in greenery of thick berry and rose bushes. I must add that the walkway’s depressions were filled with rainwater here and there. So, my mum had taken my hand while was trudging behind. Suddenly my mum stopped at a large, deep puddle . She’d said that she would be driving me on her back across the puddle. Here the story starts!
In fact, I couldn’t imagine myself riding on my mum’s back for two meaningful reasons. The first thing I was terrified of was height. Another reason was driven by embarrassment. I thought I was too old for such a ride to be spotted on the mother’s back by someone. Never could I afford this! To top it all, I felt as if I were an enormous and heavy weighed girl, although by fact I wasn’t. I really was as little and light as an ant. Odd as though it may sound, I’d objected to my mum’s command, thereby driving her nuts because we were rolling out late for the shopping before the shop could be closed for an hour-break lunch. (In the past all shops had lunch breaks from 2 to 3 afternoon.) So, my mum forced me to abide. Heed though, I regarded myself huge in size. Certainly, I was afraid that if I had perched on her back, I would have broken her vertebral column. Thus, I played up this awful climbing impelled by mum’s “Come-on’s”. Every moment I was on top, I made a movement back to earth pretending to be sliding down perforce. I’d done this many a time until my mum hit the roof . She such an angry shout at me that it took me a matter of seconds to soar and perch on her spine. At this moment I felt dizzy; remember that I feared any height if I was enable to touch the ground. Mum made a few steps into the puddle when I saw a male stranger coming towards us. It was like a sensation from the outer space as I felt not my usual self, horrified to be seen from behind my mum’s shoulder. Or else it could cause an effect of a two-headed woman conjured up in the encounter’s mind. So, I slithered down my mum’s back as she made a move up to help me along to stay as I ought to. But it made the thing worse, and she slipped when moving her feet on the bottom of the puddle, letting me splash into the dirty water. I splashed terribly, watching drops of ditchwater spray above and around over my mum’s beautiful dress.
The memory about how we were returning home has slipped my mind. What I remember is Mum's bringing buckets of water from the well. In those years there was neither central heating nor central water in countryside houses We didn’t have central gasoline either, but a kerosene stove to cook. So, it sounds like I had put mum in trouble after all. She had to heat the water in a bucket on that slow heating kerosene and then wash me from head to toe in the grey aluminium tube, which causes one more feeling of embarrassment in my memories. But this would be another story to be told.
The End
Now it's my turn to ask you. Do you remember something from the past you wish to forget?
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