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Havva stretched a tired wrist, the cloth bag filled with fresh tea leaves a familiar weight on one shoulder. The sun pressed warm between her shoulders and on the back of her neck, but the wind from the Kocari mountain cooled the sweat that dewed there.
It was a fine morning, if misty, and the tea fields rippled green till the eye could see. Havva’s hawk sight, always a point of pride in her youth, had started its slow decline to age. But she pressed a hand to shade her eyes all the same. Tea workers dotted the field, looking like beetles bent to the ground. Furthest on the east corner, near the Firtina building, the figures started to uncurl like leaves.
Havva squinted to see - two loping figures crossed the fields slowly, greeting the workers. Failing eyesight all the same, she didn’t need to see their faces to know that it was the Firtina brothers causing all the bustle. The light glinting off those golden heads was plain enough.
The muffled giggles of the new tea worker beside her made Havva snort. Those two were handsome enough she supposed, especially to this young lass blushing beside her. But Havva had seen Iso Firtina, golden haired scamp that he was, eat dirt tripping over tea bushes far too many times for her to be taken in by this new found grace of adulthood. That boy had two left feet as a child, and only Allah knew how he had grown out of it with all his teeth intact.
The deep sound of Oruc Firtina’s voice cleaved the air, greeting workers as he walked through the fields. The incessant giggling beside Havva seemed to reach hitherto unheard frequencies. Havva contemplated poking the silly girl beside her with the butt of her shears.
As Havva watched Oruc make his way down the lines of tea bushes, she admitted to herself that the boy had grown up well. Both boys. But Oruc especially. Iso had always been a sweet if cheeky child - but it was Oruc that had been the true trouble between the two.
Havva wondered how many times that idiot boy had gotten into scraps, all red ears and dirty clothes as he fought every Firtina boy between here and the Kocari mountain. And now that same boy was a doctor, all educated and proper.
Oh how the world turned and changed.
The memories tugged a fond smile on her lips as she bent down to resume her work. Only for a yelp to bring her back upright once more, cracking painfully all the way.
Between the two golden heads, appeared a dark haired figure, diminutive beside the two Firtina boys. Oruc Firtina bent down with an irrepressible grin, had one ear pinched between a pale hand.
Ah. Havva stifled a laugh.
Well she had wondered where the last of the trio had gone. Like two gold chicks, those two always seemed to follow behind Esme Firtina, rifle slung across her back and muddy boots striding across the fields.
When they were younger, Havva mused, they had truly looked like two chicks trailing behind their Yenge. Dirty hands firmly in grasp in the Firtina chief’s hand they had made many a circuit around the tea fields. Back then, Havva had thought it such a funny sight. The dark haired girl was barely out of childhood herself, but she had walked the two boys with all the authority of a tired Anne.
The two boys had obeyed with all the enthusiasm of disgruntled puppies.
Ah what wonderful days those had been. When Havva could bend up and down without cracking half her spine and Firtina children played amongst the tea fields.
Golden days had spilled over green-gold hills, and the world had felt so young.