As the eldest child in the family, I was always the first choice for errands. They found things for me to do interchangeably: Mother and Aunt for household chores, Father and Uncle for field work and tending the cattle.
Uncle used to build roofs, and sometimes he would be away from home for as long as two weeks, while Father would go out for kirija3 once or twice a week. So only the women and children remained at home.
My mother, aunt and grandmother shared the housework. Mother and Aunt would take turns each week: while one cooked for everyone, the other looked after the children, bathed and dressed them; and Grandmother oversaw everything and decided what was to be done each day.
They gradually introduced me to more difficult and heavier work, such as tending the cattle, feeding and watering them, and taking them out to graze. Sometimes I would take bread, or something to eat with bread, because I would stay outside for a long time, four or five hours.
Sometimes I deliberately stayed out longer than I should have, and they would come looking for me. I would become absorbed in something and completely lose track of time. I would find a bird’s nest on the ground and watch it. Or pick hazelnuts, sloes, strawberries or blackberries. Or gaze at the sunset, or simply at the clouds.
One day I came home very late in the evening.
“Where have you been until now? Aren’t you afraid to be outside alone so late? It isn’t right for you to be so far from home on your own, so late, up on Lazino Hill.”
And I answered:
“I just sat there for a long time and looked at the sky.”
“Well, what did you look at?”
“I saw St. Peter sitting on a chair and mending a skirt.”
And I did. I saw a cloud that clearly looked to me like a chair, with a backrest and everything. My grandmother used to have a chair like that. The sun shone on the cloud and created a glowing halo around a figure that seemed to be sitting in the chair.
To me it looked like St. Peter, because it was around St. Peter’s Day, the patron saint’s day of the church in Tržić.
As the wind blew and changed the figure, sometimes you could see his head, sometimes his arm, and then his arm would disappear. The cloud would tear apart and you could see the blue sky behind it, as though the skirt had been torn. Then, when the clouds came together again, carried by the wind, it seemed to me that St. Peter had mended the skirt.
And then, all of a sudden, he rushed away with another cloud and disappeared.
All of that was my imagination.
Which means that I was never really alone, but always lived in the company of my imagination.