Village Love That Was Swallowed by the City Fast Lane
Once in a while, we indulge in recollections about the past as an audit of where we have been and where we are today. Sometimes we feel bad that we were there, other times we feel glad that we were there as an appreciation of the journey.
One of the most cherished moments is often that of the love stories. There is something with the village life in general that cannot often be explainable but only felt. The environment itself is unique from the smelling cow dung to the morning singing by the birds to the thorn fences. It is all amazing.
When a love story gets invigorated into this whole aura, things change. For those who have never spent a lot of time in the village, you can never understand when a cowboy tells a cowgirl that her long hair reminds him of his clipart cow tail.
While growing up, there were boundaries between girls and boys. It was stipulated in an unexplained code of conduct that as young boys we had our microcosm aptly different from that of the ladies and one which was supposed to remain so until such a time when the elders decided otherwise.
I grew up respecting this social ethic. In fact like some of us reading this, I kept my distance from the girls up to the time when science proved us wrong. Like any other society, some are extreme and in our case, it was the boy who got caned during parade time for being with girls over the weekends. To us, there was the ‘rotten’ lot until all of a sudden the whole thing began to be fashionable for us as well.
Soon we could realize that the heart had another work other than that of pumping blood. That within the heart lay a parabola of emotional current that got sparked with looking at a girl as a girl and not merely another human being like everybody else.
We embarked on love journeys purely knowing that our hearts could lead us to the promised land of Canaan. We were wrong because now we have realized that the heart is just a pump with the sole purpose of pumping blood and that going to Canaan even in reality is a hard fete.
But those ‘stupid’ love moments live on in our hearts. They are what we cherish today. These were the genuine moments when we went to our girlfriend’s places and sang to notify them that we could meet at the river.
This was the time when gifts were simple but cherished dearly. I remember we used to show love by taking girls for outings. An outing meant accompanying the girl to the river, waiting for them to go to church together, or going and helping them to fetch firewood.
The gifting part was an interesting one too. They included loquats, guavas, and sugarcane, and when we grew up a little it changed to the little sugary things such as sweets and baked products. And in a sense, we believed in that love and for some, it mutated into the families they have today.
For the rest of the cream, the city and town’s fast lives happened and things never remained the same. Our definition of love somehow changed and we started seeing gifts in big ways, outings became a part of the fast life, and all of a sudden we were as though born to this.
But as always, we got the memories with us. To some like me, the village remained in us and a little of us remained there. For the love, we put together what remained of us, and of we went with it to try and redefine ourselves with the new meaning.
We keep going with whatever we salvaged of ourselves from the village and as we wake up every morning and retire to our beds every night, we know that tomorrow will come and we will stand to give our stories of how we managed to make it through this circus.