Читать книгу Were not were - - Страница 61

It was an old pear, fairly worn by time. She grew up in the backyard and under her shadow grew more than one generation of the inhabitants of the grandfather’s house. The best place in the whole wide world. In the spring, when the pear blossomed, we played in its shade, and in the summer we sat on the branches all day long and ate the still green fruits, and these were the most delicious pears in my life. When autumn came, it was always mourning for the best days of the year: the pear dropped its leaves, and we were forcibly separated from it and sent to school. Only on New Year’s Eve did we meet again and rejoiced at the opportunity that had happened to spend the entire winter holidays together again. Only now the branches served as a place for hanging homemade bird feeders for bullfinches and tits, and around the trunk they made a snowman and played snowballs and drove each other on sleds. And so from year to year, until one day we grew up and stopped noticing the old pear: our world tree, huge as the sky, strewn with the fruits of goodness, around which our entire childhood passed and which raised us and let us out into the world. And I am grateful to fate that such a tree happened in my life, a real tree of the knowledge of goodness.