More of this or that

http://youtu.be/_97U5e_iE0c

In the summer’s she’d get him to take a week off work, and she, and their two young sons would travel out to the country, and spend the week living in a small cottage that adjoined the land that they’d sold, and that the new owners let them have once year, gratis, for just such an occasion. And the boys would run out in the fields and stare at the horses breathing cold air, snorting in the morning, they’d cut through the tall grass waving swords or shooting rifles while the man and his wife stayed on the front porch, sipping tea, and watching them quietly, long past the point when words were necessary to describe the sort of feeling that they shared for one another. The sky was pastel, the mountains in the distant, pale blue. A vulture might fly overhead, and they’d watch it descend in lazy circles, hands occasionally clasped, happy to be in the country.

The rest of his family was at the manor during the first shelling. They had risen in the early morning, packed, and disappeared down the dry cobble stone street. The shoe maker could not remember if he’d said goodbye to each one of them before they left, didn’t know if he’d laid hands on his youngest child, a boy of eight, before they disappeared forever. How was he to have known that it would be the last time that he’d see them? Such vagaries of the world are of the sort that confound mortal men. It was strange to pass so many days with life one way, his wife and children in his company, and then to have them blotted out forever one hazy afternoon, and all the days that followed would now become normal instead.

He’d stayed an extra evening to finish packing up his shoes, his perfect little creations. It was important to him, as it would be to any craftsman, that his shoes not be ruined. He worked after they’d left for hours, moving things into the basement. Surely the rumored shelling would not come. Such things had been promised before and not come to fruition. He had sent them off to a safer place. In the evening, he wandered outside and stood on the street to watch a burning golden sun set itself on fire against the background of old poplars, and it’s hard not to want to stop him at that moment in time, the day’s work done and done well, and his life still comprised of the various puzzle pieces that he’d brought together through years of toil, thinking that it was a rock that he’d been building, not knowing that it could be scattered like a pile of leaves by an autumn wind.