Eight Year Old

It's winter now, the most unproductive time of the year. Winter is when the new year starts, as it is the end of the harvesting season. Nothing, specific, happens to celebrate the start of the new year. It just seems to be a way to count the number of years to have passed. And it is also the end of the continuous toil of the previous year. It is just another year.

The primary things my sister and I do during this time of the year, is to be educated in things outside of daily life. Shocking to mean, and my assumption, is that most people are literate. I know, it is surprising. I always assumed that reading and writing was something most, non-wealthy, people did not know how to do. Then again, if I would have considered, messages, request, and such need to be remembered. If somebody asks you to help them out with something, in the future, it is easy enough to forget what was needed. So writing is used.

I think I like this way of writing better, than my previous writing system of the Latin alphabet. Instead of trying to combine letters together, to approximate a word, this one is different. It uses syllabic sounds per character. Once you learn the alphabet, with the sounds included, it is relatively simplistic to be able to write any word. Yes, there are more characters to learn. However, once you do, if you know how to pronounce a word, it is easy. No more worrying about weird spellings of words.

Along with learning to read and write, math is taught. This scared me more than anything else, before I started to learn it. I have understood, but not been fluent in, other base numbers, other than base 10. Luckily, though, what is common, is base 10 numbers. Learning how to write it was interesting. The characters are basically made by making hash markings along a central character. I will not bore you over the characters, but for me, it was... fun to expand my knowledge.

Oh yeah, did I tell you what we write on? It is not paper. Why would it be paper? Paper is a complex thing to make, or at least I think it is. And it is not animal skin. Who would waste leather, just to write a few characters, here and there. Leather is more useful than as a thing put writing on. No, it is wood bark. Somehow, in the area we lived, the trees have a thin bark, that when soaked and pressed down, becomes a wonderful medium to write upon. Now if we had something better than charcoal pencils to write with. This is not the best way to write information to store over long periods of time, as the bark will slowly crack. But to learn how to read and write, it's perfect.

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Katarina, my; dear, sweet, wonderful, beautiful, cheerful, sister. What? What? Was I gushing out over my sister? Of course not. She is to precious to debase with something so mundane as gushing.

Well, anyways, Katarina, unlike me, does not have the benefit of a previous life, to help bolster her learning capabilities. Nor does she have the inquisitiveness of me. That is not to say that she is dumb. No, she is like most kids, sitting still and trying to learn is a chore, in itself, for her. When she is able to focus, she has an extremely agile mind, which makes learning for her easy.

While I would love to be the person who teaches her, just to be a better big brother for her, I cannot let my parents not have the enjoyment of teaching her. I am still acting like a little kid around them, just to see the happiness of them. Much as I never thought I would, I love them. I think I have interacted with them more than I did with my past parents.

This was the hardest thing for me to admit to myself. I loved my past parents, I truly did. I think, in all honestly, it was more a type of love borne out of respect and conformity. In this life, relationships are deeper than anything I experienced previously. For the longest time, out of stubbornness, I could not accept my true feelings about my family. Looking back at my thoughts, it hurts me that I could not see the reality in front of me. This is MY family.