...of siblings

Nowhere. My mother would throw back her head and gaze up at the clouds, as if she expected a flock of winged children to come swooping down. After a while, she uttered the same cry, then grew weary of questioning the heavens, and with her fingernail broke open a dry poppy-head, scratched a rose-stem dotted with green aphids, dropped the first walnuts into her pocket, shook her head as she brooded over the vanished children, and went back into the house. Meanwhile, in the branches of a walnut tree above, there gleamed down the triangular face of a child lying stretched out like a tomcat along a thick branch, in silence. A less short-sighted mother might have realised that when the twin peaks of the two fir trees exchanged hasty bows, they were being shaken by more than merely the sudden gusts of October wind... And in the square dormer window, above the pulley for hauling up fodder, might she not have spotted, if she screwed up her eyes, those two pale patches standing out against the hay: the face of a young boy, and his book? But she had abandoned her attempt to find out where we were, she had given up any chance of reaching us. No shout or cry accompanied our strange turbulence. I do not think anyone has ever seen children that were livelier and yet more silent. Only now does this surprise me. Nobody had asked us to be so cheerfully mute, or so relatively unsociable. My brother, the one who was nineteen and built hydrotherapy apparatuses from sausage-shaped pieces of cloth, pieces of wire and glass tubes, never stopped his younger brother who was fourteen, from dismantling a watch, or making a faultless piano reduction of a melody or some symphonic piece he had heard in the nearby town - nor from taking an obscure pleasure in dotting the garden with little tombstones he had cut out of cardboard, each of which bore, under its cross, the names, the epitaph and the genealogy of some imaginary dead person... My sister, who wore her hair too long, could read for as long as she liked, without pausing for rest: the two boys would pass by her as if they did not see her, brushing past the young girl who just sat there, her mind enraptured and far away, without ever disturbing her. When I was little I could, if I wished, follow the boys, almost running after them as they strode along, plunging into the woods in pursuit of red admirals, swallowtails and purple emperors, or hunting for grass snakes, or gathering up armfuls of the tall July foxgloves that grew in the clearings deep in the woods, glowing red with pools of heather... But I tagged along in silence, and picked blackberries, wild cherries, or flowers; I explored the coppices and the waterlogged meadows like a dog who is free and doesn't owe anyone any explanation...

[Claudine's House, Colette, S-G.]