They immediately caught my attention and I don´t know why, I couldn´t help remembering my childhood, fact that on the other hand, I consider strante taking into account that fortunately, I hadn´t been born yet when the civil war broke out. Nevertherless, the images made me bring to mind old memories. Although I didn’t exist when the war took place, now, from the perspective that the distance in time gives, I can recognize that almost thirty years later of the outbreak _ and then I was ten or eleven years old_ still there was a kind of black shadow which remainded latent not only in people’s mind or hearts but also in every corner of the own village.
In some way, the people in the photos were like the people I used to see in my chilhood.
I remember seeing most of the old women, dressed from head to feet in black or, it would be better to say in “deep black” because only black is not enough to express the profound darkness they were sunk in. Black not only was the colour of their clothes but it was the colour of their souls as well. The smile had dissapeared from their faces; their eyes, tired of crying the loss of a husband or what is worse, a son, kept seeing without looking, with their sight lost in the distance, hanging off their own memories.
Wounds of the past were not close yet.
Poverty could be seen everywhere as if the time hadn´t passed. Unpaved roads, humble houses shared by persons and animals, large families subsinting on very basic food, mucky children with snots playing on the mud, are some of the flashes of this period of my life.We had no toys, nor television nor computer games, but our games were endless and our imagination did not have limits. My slide was the slope of a small bank; my mat was the straw of threshing; my balls pool was a barn full of wheat; my bowling alley was a hole on the ground; a rope was the line to make friends and a bike...a bike was the dream of any child.
Because my village was, and still is, a poor village; one of those which belongs to what we call rural Spain: hardened skin and noble of hearts.
Your story is very moving and I very much appreciate your sharing it with us.
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