Imagine a continual range of lush green, majestic mountains surrounding a simple village; a village full of honest, hard working, admirable people. Imagine a mulberry tree in the back yard of a sophisticatedly unsophisticated grandmother; a tree so prepossessing that inspired a hungry and depressed artist, a true genius, to express his inner turbulences through her shaking leaves.
A few young boys are merrily balancing on the branches of the tree, shaking the hell out of it to inspire ripened mulberries to shower down like heavy rain on a deluge. Other boys, disappointed that they are not the ones on the tree, are helping grandma stretch a white linen sheet under the tree to collect the rain fall, the hail, the heavenly fruit.
The garden is a mess. We’ve managed to catch most of the fruit but the rest, the other most, is all over the grass around the tree. The day is starting to get warmer and it's getting sticky under our bare feet.
“The girls will clean it up, don’t you worry,” the grandmother says with a twinkle in her fading eyes.
“Poor girls,” we worry wondering who they are, “They have some serious cleaning to do.”
Our sympathy for the unknown girls quickly dwindles to a state of indifference. Like apathetic sloths with bellies full of sweetness, we lay under the coolth of the tree shade when we suddenly hear a dissonance of squeals in the distance. Our stomachs are full of mulberries but we lazily turn our heads. Eleven to fourteen gilts, young female pigs, are scampering towards us.
We move aside.
They gobble up the entire fallen fruit.
The grass is green again.
The afternoon is lazy. It’s time to put our legs up and take a nap under the safekeeping of grandma’s mulberry tree.
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