第72章　祖父母の家での週末

Every autumn my family travels to visit our aged grandparents in a small rural village in the mountains. The journey takes nearly five hours, but we look forward to it all year.

My grandmother greets us with a wide embrace at the front gate. She is elderly now, but her smile is as vivid as I have always remembered, and her voice still carries the warmth of a summer afternoon.

The whole village runs on tradition. Most families still tend a small crop of rice in the wet soil of the valley floor, and a few elderly farmers keep a small herd of cattle in the green fields above the river.

Saturday morning is the busiest. We join in the autumn harvest, helping to bundle rice straw under a comfortable autumn sun. My grandfather shows me, year after year, the patient knot he learned as a boy.

My grandfather, a modest but generous man, tells us familiar stories at lunch. His mature voice makes even an ordinary memory feel valuable, and the room falls silent each time he begins.

After the meal, there is a quiet hour of leisure. My grandmother is fond of arranging flowers on the table while my sister and I sit in the pleasant warmth of the wood stove and read old magazines.

As night falls we recall the games we played here as children. Each memory is fresh, almost too vivid to bear, and we delight in retelling them as though for the first time. When we drive home Sunday evening, the rural roads are silent. My parents are quiet too, no doubt thinking, as I am, how comfortable our few days at the old house have been.