“The Summer of 1970”

There’s a story from my childhood I
only learned later in life—and it
genuinely shocked me.

It must have been around 1969 or
1970.

I was four or five. My little sister was
about three.

We lived in a small mountain village
back then.

One summer day, my grandmother
suddenly said,
“Hey… where did those kids go?”

My mother panicked.
“They were asking for something
earlier… maybe a float ring… I wasn’t
really listening…”

Then it hit her.

“Their float is gone!”

A bad feeling.

They rushed to the nearby river.

What they found there was… surreal.

My sister was lying on the riverbank,
covered in bug bites.
And right beside her, I was casually
playing in the water—with a barely
inflated float ring.

Apparently, she had nearly drowned,
and I had “saved her.”

I vaguely remember something like
that. Maybe.

But the real shock was this:

We had gone there alone.

To reach that river, you had to walk
down a narrow mountain path,
climb down rocky slopes,
and even cross part of the stream.

It wasn’t just dangerous—it was
absurd.

In my family, there’s a habit:
if something is inconvenient, it
simply isn’t spoken of.

I had only ever heard,
“You saved your sister.”

Not the rest of the story.

Looking back,
the fact that we’re both still alive is
nothing short of a miracle.

If things had gone differently,
I might still be living with that weight
today.

And yet—

I sometimes wonder if that incident
pushed my grandmother’s faith
in a… rather peculiar direction.

Which, in its own way, is another
complicated story.

Postscript

Not long after that,
our parents still let us go play in the
river—
just kids, led by slightly older children
from the village.

That was just a normal summer day
back then.

Funny how people forget danger
once it passes.

------------------------------------------------------

Serious, but playful — giving it my all.

Don’t rush. Savor every bite.