A Little Scare
Today I was at the newspaper when Adverb called to tell me about the fire. For a couple of seconds I stayed very worried. Was close to our farming community. I felt fear for my father's farm and for the neighbors.
The prospect of suddenly seeing everything taken away by the flames is horrible. It's hard to imagine what people all around my country suffered from this catastrophe during this summer. Many, many poor people stayed without their houses and their animals. People that worked all their lives to have something suddenly saw the fires take everything away. The worst is, many of these fires may be criminal. I wonder how people can do this. How can someone start a fire and how can someone order it?
Fortunately, nothing too bad happened around our place, which means that luckily nobody got hurt, no house was attacked by the flames and the firemen - real heroes in this country -- did their best and they controlled the situation.
But, for a couple of seconds I stayed really worried. My father worked for the past 30 years on this farm alone, caring for it with his own hands. Any time he came from the military base, when he was working in Oporto, he went to the farm to work (to relax, according to his point of view). Now he is retired and the farm is where he spends most of his time.
This is the place where I have my best memories with my brother. I remember the way we jumped and played freely with the dogs, with a lot of space just for us. At that time my father had rabbits, chickens, a pig, even a bull. Now, he only has chickens and two big dogs.
I remember the way my father used to play with us on the farm. I remember the way my father and my brother tried to catch frogs. I remember the way I was all the time looking for crickets and my father and brother were all the time mocking me because of it. Was so nice to be at home, much nicer than to be in Lisbon or any of the other cities we had to go because my father was often on missions outside Oporto.
I remember that in the year before I went to the university in Lisbon I used to bring my high school friends to my father's house for lunch. We ate pizzas (not my father), we walked around the farm, we did big messy. My father never minded.
And now Adverb and I live next to my father and my sister. Today, for example - just to finish -- when I left home to go to the newspaper I had Adverb saying goodbye from one of our home windows and my cute nephew saying goodbye from the window of his house. I like how all of us get along together, even if during so many years past the situation was complex and difficult.
But I guess the important thing is not how you start, but how you finish - as Adverb says.
Here is my father's house and a little bit of his farm. Under these leaves chickens run in front of the dogs... (nobody gets hurt).