Happy pre-grade school summer memory

I hereby declare a common blog topic — I guess people call them “memes” (boo!) — for today. This was actually an idea that I think kerowack mentioned a long time ago, then Seppo brought up again recently, so I won’t claim credit for it.

For today, blog about a happy summer memory you have from before grade school.

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When I was a wee little girl, perhaps a *cough* Wee-Nyung, I used to live in Seoul. It was a crowded, busy place, not without its charms. But every summer and winter break, my family used to go to the countryside, where my grandmas lived within a mile or two down the road from each other.

During those summers, my other cousins would also all be visiting at the same time. We used to roam around, all 5-10 of us, depending on who was there at the time, going to the stream to swim around or trekking to the quarry or helping my grandma’s duck-and-gooseherder herd around the snowy white ducks and geese. I was a favorite of the herding girl, so she used to take me on my own sometimes. The summers were as perfectly Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as you could have on a completely different continent and in a completely different time.

I can’t quite remember any specific memories. There are vague memories of bursting into tears when my older boy cousin showed me a large, stunning spider web spanning across an wooded path, a rainbow of light sparking through the dew, then threw a rock through it. I remember when I went swimming without my mom’s permission and got in trouble because she was worried I was too small and would get hurt, but I couldn’t find it in myself to regret the experience. 🙂 I think I remember watching my grandma care for her bean sprouts, pouring water over them in their darkened & lidded clay jar. I think I remember my older brother or someone laying down another large rock between the others ones for me to cross over the low part of the stream because I was shorter than most of the other kids, who could hop between the further set stones. My memories are all very fragmented. I wish I could remember more. I just know I was as happy as any kid could be.

Oh, I also remember going “fishing” in the stream. We’d get a large towel or sheet and lay it across the streem, one person on each side, holding it vertically into the water so that the stream would filter through the material on its way downstream. The stream was so full of fish that we’d catch a couple of little things every time. I think once we brought them back to eat, but most of the times, we just let them go.

The other thing we used to do is go collect the special kind of snails that my grandma would cook up. We’d run out to the thorn bush outside her house and break off a large thorn for each person, so that we could use them to pick out the snails from their spiral shells (or whatever they are called). Ah, good times.