Chestnuts.

When I think of home, I hear crickets chirping and the gentle humming of the river near the house. I can smell coffee and my mum’s plum cake, cows and freshly cut grass. I can feel wet soil under my bare feet and the special kind of tiredness after a long hike, the kind that makes you collapse into bed.

When I was a kid, I used to hide from my mum to read. After school, she would make me do my homework (which I didn’t mind that much usually, un- less it was maths) and then she would have a million chores for me to help with. I was impatient to get back to my book (there was always a book) and sometimes I would sneak away and hide somewhere and read for hours.

One of my favorite spots was near the cross, where a landslide had cut a little valley into the hill, like a dry riverbed, with rock shelters and platforms and holes. I would sit in the shade of a chestnut tree on the edge of the landslide valley, hidden from both the upper path that I came from and the lower path that I could see from my position but from where I’d be spotted only if some- one would look straight up to the sky.

Sometimes, when I finished my book or when I just went there to be alone I would drift off into daydreams about things that were important to me back then. Every now and then, people would walk past on the lower path and I loved watching them. Mostly I knew them, or at least I had seen them before: neighbors, or people from the village. The ones that I didn’t know were tour- ists, those were easy to spot: they were wearing extensive hiking gear and mountain boots that were way over the top for those kind of paths. The clatter- ing of their hiking sticks cut through the quiet long before they came around the corner.

When I was there, I completely lost track of time. After a while, I would squint my eyes and check the clock on the church bell tower and run home to help my mum after all.