We Were the Kings of the Mountains

Oana-Maria Moldovan

It was Summer that year, whenever we went it was Summer. I don’t remember the first time I was carried along those paths. My mother always tells me I was a baby.

In second grade I had to read Heidi. I hated the book with a rage I didn’t know I had in me at that age. Back then I saw myself as a mountain girl, Heidi was nothing compared to the Summers I spent up there.

Every Summer was the same. The school year would end and after a two-hour car ride I would arrive up in the mountains with my grandmother and other kids and their grandmothers. Summer was our time. 

We hated the month of June, it wasn’t hot enough to jump off the cliffs into the cold water. The June month was for reading children’s books, playing cards on our front porch, reminiscing about the Summers that have gone by and the faces we only saw at that time of year. June month was for eating sunflower seeds in the evenings and hiking in the woods surrounding the place. 

July was the time when the noise started. We’d trade sunflower seeds for pancakes and card games for hide and seek. In July came the “tourists”, the ones who didn’t spend every day for three months in these parts of the word. In July we would sunbathe, in the grass, on old blankets. In July the family with their thirteen children usually came as well. In July was also the time when the family with the older boy from next door came. 

August was perfect, especially the first few weeks. August was the month to jump in the water, to walk an hour to the only store that sold ice cream. In August, we’d give up the pancakes for boiled corn. In August, people would start to leave, to ease the place. In August we were once kings. 

When we went there we were all friends, regardless of age.

There was the family with the thirteen children, ten of whom you found most often in the big house on the hill. There, the one who took care of the other’s homework and sleep schedules was the oldest sister. Campfires were held in that space, and on weekends, when the older boys came over, we would throw our plastic sledges on the grass from the highest point we could find.

There was also the family that had a foster boy. We would go hiking with them, especially to the waterfall. I have an old picture of us from back then. I used to be taller than all the boys back then. 

There were also the cousins sitting above us, five of them, born almost every two years apart from each other; two boys and three girls. With the youngest I played with dolls, because her older sister had once, long ago, also played with me. She played with me, and left me this legacy, to play with the younger ones as well. With the boys I played cards on the porch of my apartment. Sometimes I played checkers with the older one. Then when it got dark we’d play hide-and-seek and badminton. 

To the left lived the older boy, who one Summer kissed one of the older cousins, even though he liked the other. He used to play with me when I was little, too. He loved Winnie the Pooh and when he grew up and went to high school he left me the stuffed pig he had. I still have it.

After their house followed the youngest girl, named after her father’s ex-girlfriend. She had lots of toys and no friends. I would go over to her house when there was nothing to do and her grandmother would ask me. We used to play “kitchen games”. I wondered then if she was going to be a cook. She should be in high school by now.   

There was also the girl in the woods, the niece of a friend of my mother’s. I didn’t see her all the time, but she was one of the few girls my age. 

And then there was the granddaughter of the old man who owned the old guest house in the valley; I met her only for two Summers. She was blond and wore clothes that at that age I associated with what a teenager would wear.          

And then there was the family we were next to on the right; still five cousins, still three girls and two boys. The older ones were my age. They rode ATVs and had expensive toys. They played tennis not badminton and rarely called me and the boys over to play hide and seek in their backyard. The older boy would come to our yard and watch us play cards and ask questions. However the girls never came. 

My grandma did crossword puzzles and watched Spanish soap operas on the little TV we had in one of the rooms. In the evenings she played Sudoku. When we got pancakes from the upstairs neighbors, she would make pies. She made the best pies, so good that the boys would fight over them. She always gave me twenty dollars when I went to buy ice cream and asked me to bring her one with chocolate and peanuts. She used to sit in the kitchen a lot. If I was reading in the house, she would sit in the kitchen so as not to disturb me, if I was playing outside she would sit in the kitchen and watch me from the windows. 

She would talk to the grandmother of the cousins upstairs, the mother of the older boy and the grandmother of the lonely little girl. And when the family with the foster boy came over she would sit for hours, chain smoking and drinking coffee with the foster boy’s mother. They would talk about other people in the valley, their lives, what else was on TV and recipes upon recipes for baked chicken. 

On weekends, parents and tourists alike came. It was noisy and we’d go on hikes where we’d pick berries and see little snakes. We’d sunbathe all day long and learn to make campfires in the evenings. On weekends adults visited each other; I played with the dogs at every house we went to.

That’s how I grew up, I was a “mountain girl” for thirteen years. We were kings; me and all the other kids. But that’s the point, we were children. We read books about other children doing the same things we did, we visited caves and ate the little pink berries growing under our stairs. We made up stories about haunted houses and fought with water pistols. We were tanned and our hair was always sunkissed. 

And then one day we weren’t anymore. We grew up. Today we’re city kids. Back then, we were the kids that were raised in the mountains. We were the kings of the mountains and didn’t even know it. We were children, and we were kings. 

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Oana-Maria is a young creative, aspiring journalist and writer from Romania, who wants to find beauty in the most unexpected places. She is an avid human rights social activist who thinks that we have to make the word a better place for the younger generations