The swing

My oldest memory might have been during  the same summer that I had my first experience with cats, when I learnt that behind magic green eyes may hide a devilish creature. Summertime was as long as a bad preacher’s sermon then, as if life was going to last forever. I spent the first holiday that I recall at my grandmother’s vacational property. She had inherited it, after the Spanish Civil War, from distant relatives that had tragically passed away, shot down by revolutionaries. That was the story I had been told years before but, as I was just a baby the year I went there, maybe younger than two, the only knowledge I had of the evil that the place had seen, were those feline eyes down the dark corridor, like a lighthouse leading sailors to murky waters,  and the scary and hipnotic purring that the cat produced. Although the redish-tiled house was in the centre of the small village, it had an immense garden with trees and even a pergola, where the ladies of my family sat to gossip and tell stories, some of them secretly whispered when terms like “gynaecologist”, “breast” or “giving birth” were the main topics. The swing was beside the pergola. It hung from an olive tree branch and the person who made it probably chose a short tree for safety reasons , just in case the rope broke, although it was hardly a metre high from the ground.The swing had not the usual wooden seat rather a big basket with a comfortable cushion inside and I was so little that the swing was my cradle by day. I still have memories of the acrid smell of the dry straw inside the basket and the tickles on my tiny hands when I grabbed its rough edges. That day the sun was shining through the narrow leaves of the olive tree, whimsically drawing forms on my dress , according to the soft breeze that was shaking the foliage, sparkling as if it had been made of silver. My eyes squinted every time the leaves made way for a sun beam, hot like a dragon’s kiss. I was gently rocked by Nature’s hand and lulled by a choir of singing insects. The swing was the spaceship that took me to Planet Happiness when life was in black and white and in slow motion.