The Shortcut

My cousin had lived in the city her whole life, but this summer she and her family had moved to the countryside because of her allergies. As often as I’ve had the chance, I’ve visited her. I have spent almost all my summer vacations at her home. She is 12 days older than me, but we are as close as sisters. We learned how to walk on the same day and I have known her as long as I can remember. After I didn’t see her for a year and a half, because of her move, I convinced my mother to let me visit her.
My aunt, my cousin and I were buying food for the weekend. My aunt’s cell phone rang and my cousin’s brother said that he needed my aunt to come home immediately. She decided to leave the shopping to my cousin and me. We said that should be no problem and she gave us money and left. I remember that we bought much more than my aunt had planned, because she forgot to tell us what to buy. We bought lots of sweets and candies, and just some of the food that she wanted us to buy. When we were done shopping and eating our huge ice-cream cones, we started on our way home. Since my cousin just moved to the place, she was not very well oriented, so we decided to follow the way we came by my aunt’s car. After we had walked for a while, we came to an intersection. We both knew which way we came an hour earlier, but for some reason, I don’t remember why, we took the other way. Probably because it looked like it led more in the direction of the house, and according to our coordination we thought it was a shortcut.
We continued walking and started talking about the days when we were kids. Days when there was usually nothing to do, but we enjoyed each other’s company. While walking on a quiet, long road we discussed all the weird things we had done when we were children. We remembered the time when we had put dandelion leaves in my uncle’s salad, which he didn’t notice, and the hot summer day when we had a picnic on her neighbors’ garage roof.
I have always wished to be as tall as my cousin. Once when we were kids, we thought there was something wrong with me, since I was so short compared to her, so we decided to do something about it. We found a tree with a branch that she could reach and I couldn’t. We had brought a chair and I climbed up and grabbed the branch. My cousin removed the chair and then pulled with all her strength to make me reach the ground. Mysteriously enough, it didn’t work. We tried several other methods, but nothing worked, so we concluded that life was unfair.
While talking about old days, we forgot that we were trying to find our way home. We had reached an uninhabited place where canyons were covered with a green carpet of trees. Without noticing how long we had been walking, we found out that we were hungry, so we decided to eat some of the food we just bought and enjoy the view. We counted three cars passing by during the hour we sat there. Since neither of us knew where we were, we decided to walk the five kilometers, which we didn’t know we had walked, back to the shop. With our sense of place, we agreed that the way we had chosen previously led us in a totally wrong direction.
After coming to the intersection again, we went back to the shop and bought another ice-cream with the rest of our money. We went the way we knew was right at the intersection and focused really hard on recognizing the way we had arrived earlier. After ten minutes of walking, my aunt’s car passed by. I don’t think she saw us, because she just drove by us without honking or waving. We turned and ran and shouted like crazy, and then she stopped. She told us that she had been looking for us for an hour, and she wondered where we had been. We told her about the intersection and the nice canyons. After our explanation, she wanted to see that place, so we drove the way we had walked. When we arrived at the place where we had eaten all of our food, my aunt said that place was not far from their house, and just a kilometer later we finally arrived home. The lesson we learned was that what we thought was the wrong way turned out to be a shortcut in the end. It was at least shorter than going all the way back to the shop.