The Secret Tree

I wanted my first story to be about a positive part of my life that I spent in the south, which I carry in my heart before I put it on paper.

I still remember my childhood days in the village of Tule, in the district of Nabatieh. I lived there from the age of seven to thirteen. Tule was not always beautiful, but the summer holidays were always a bright exception. My family consisted of five members besides myself, while my mother's family was large, comprising twenty-seven people at the time, and then increasing when my uncle married for the second time.

In the summer of 2007, at Teta's house tucked away in the embrace of Wadi al-Duwair, my cousins and I played together almost every day. While our parents were rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of the 2006 war, we played and had fun as if the world belonged to us alone.

I was lucky: five children my age and no other residents in the valley. Teta was annoyed by our loud voices, but we paid no attention, as we had a mission that could not be delayed. We would wake up early, drink tea with a bite of labneh, and then run to the end of the valley. We looked right and left. No one was there. So we continued our mission: to climb the "big" mountain, as we called it. The climb was neither easy nor short, but we had drawn a map and hidden food in secret places along the way. We had one unchanging goal: to reach the secret tree.

The road was long, strewn with thorns and small turtles, and lined with sorrel plants. At midday, we arrived. That tree. A huge, towering oak tree, untouched by many feet and unpolluted by foreign hands. To others, it may have been just an ordinary tree, but to us it was a home, a playground, and shade from the scorching southern sun. It was not our discovery alone, but a family legacy passed down from generation to generation.

Under that tree, we played house and hide-and-seek, we cried and fought and made up, we laughed and talked about things we wouldn't talk about anywhere else. Throughout all those years, the secret tree was the silent guardian of our childhood secrets and the keeper of our memories. As the day drew to a close, my uncle's wife would call out to us across the valley: it was time for tea and homework.

Those were beautiful days. The last time I visited the secret tree was eight years ago. It was no longer secret; houses surrounded it on all sides, and it became just another tree in a new neighborhood, perhaps to be cut down one day. But it will remain etched in my memory, an inseparable part of my childhood in the south.