I see the child plunge into the swift stream
near the river bank where I am standing.
  It swims beautiful butterfly strokes and
  free strokes. The river carries in its images
my recollections of the river from the city
which I was many times familiar with during
my child hood. Barges, and ferries loaded
with hucksters, office workers, soldiers, students,
factory workers were running up and down the
stream brought with them the active, flowing
blood of lines of a beating heart.

On the two sides of the river, old houses,
and every corner’s trees of the town submerged
quietly into the dim light behind the thick fog.
The smell of houses, of trees, and of flowers
that was found nowhere else in the world
had kept an ultimate memory in my mind.

Standing on the ferry as a child, I saw other children
swimming near the bank and in the swift stream
while ferries drifting away from it. Now, that same
child, who was reflecting the eighteen years of life
in a different position, didn’t know that one day 
another child could experience the same things it did.

The child crept forward and tried to reach the
toy globe with its hand. It was as if the child had
been trying to grasp the world being estranged to
its understanding. The child did not even look back
behind where its mother had just put it down on
the floor and let it fumble to crawl by itself.
It didn’t want to go back to the world of the mother
which it had been so much familiar and felt bored.

And then it didn’t any longer remember what had
passed until it began to walk speedily and to run      
stably with a more understanding of everything
around it including abstract concepts that it learned
through television or from the teachings of the schools.
For a while the child started to have more acquaintances—
the teachers, the classmates, the neighbors, and it
was no longer alone by itself between the walls of its
mother’s own house; instead, it was stepping into
a broader world, the one that it had tried to reach
when it was unable to walk and still crawling. After
having crossed over the four walls of its own house
and no longer in that familiar world, it became a person
called an adult who now is doing almost the same things
we had done while we’re in the adult’s world. 

We lived on the mountains but loved to look down
on the plains and tried to live like as if we had been
close to the rivers. We grumbled when we could not
move the body, or we cried when we had too much
space to take up. Our minds sometimes wandered back
to the anecdotes of the past molesting the present and
inciting the futures. The gist could never be found living
only in the idleness or in the tranquility of the soul, but
in motley, troublesome situations. Our thinking changed
according to different reasons; many complaints in winter,
business in spring and fall, and lots of reaching-out in summer.
Each year would be written anew with new faces to see,
new stories to tell, and new discoveries to be made as if
nothing were to be saved.

We have worn out our bodies through the years of
our lives and have been challenged by the Creator, only
with prayers that allowed us to continue our hard
journeys through time. Satisfactions were to know that
God was always with us in any happy or sad situation
that we experienced.

Now I still continue to watch the children playing,
learning and even facing and dealing with their own
lives. I am seeing the child of my child thirty years ago
walking, running, carrying its life like the one I heavily
carried years ago.