It was a rather warm day and to escape from the usual sickening annual family fighting season (when all my relatives gather up to celebrate Christmas and the New Year) I have volunteered to pay a visit to granny Hermes; who was ‘a thousand years old’ according to my younger cousins and whom I should really call great-grandmamma.

The wind was unexpectedly meek and the heat was sitting up straight on every single atom in the air, so that with every breathe one took in it offered a generous gulp of seemingly re-used warm air which settled heavily in the chest, squeezing every particle of cooked oxygen into the blood veins. The cicadas were deafening. One of my aunts, aunt Liz, asked politely if I could stay a bit longer with granny Hermes, so that I could enjoy my holidays better; which, I suppose, did not make the slightest sense even to herself, it should really be rephrased and put into some hyperbole which should read ‘Leave us along a bit longer so us adults could enjoy ourselves better.’

I was way passed the age when everyone in the family referred every boring piece of news as ‘adult business’ that had nothing to do with me, and they had long ceased talking in codes at my presence. Yet I became stuck in between generations of my huge range of relatives. As it turned out, grandmamma (who has two children) has two sisters and a handful of cousins;mamma was born when grandmamma was at her late thirtieth, who gave birth to me when she was about the same age. Which resulted in my first cousins being some 15 years older than me and my own brother eight years older. So the family tree covered a huge range and no one had ever bothered to draw it. We have ten-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, 60-year-olds and 70-year-olds, and stuck in the midth of these were me and granny Hermes; the former for some reason (probably the Great War spirit) did not have any similar aged cousins and the later was simply too old and isolated to be mingled within the chaos.

As my tiny creamy car drew at the clearing in front of granny Hermes’ place (she did not have a garage, because she had redecorated it into a gazebo-cum-stable where I spent many summer nights wondering which star I was gazing at; and from which influence I did not like driving much myself), the sun sent a mysteriously hazy glow across the pale blue roof and granny Hermes opened the door at my call, almost immediately, maybe she knew I’d come, and was waiting for me.