Now, Shelby is on his own. He gallops around his vast enclosure. If this still bores for him, he trots to visit to his sunny stable, with all of its windows and its doors welcoming in the fresh spring air and the late morning light. He can play with the collie, provided that the farmer releases him into the pony's enclosure. He could have a fun time rolling on the mud with the pigs. He might come near the poultry pens, and scare off the chickens, ducks, and geese for his own pleasure and amusement. On the event in which some neighbours come outside and have their lunch, he would watch.
When the farmer goes out to feed his lunch, he goes to the chickens first, the ducks afterwards, then the geese, the pigs, his collie Bimo, and lastly, Shelby. The pony's lunch is the usual hay-and-apples (or carrots) course.
On the blazing afternoons, the farmer works on a patch of his yard opposite Shelby's enclosure, and places Shelby into a harness to plough the fields. At 5 p.m. , the college bus stops by the front yard, with Natalie and her two brothers coming home (amid Shelby's cheerful greetings) after a long and exhausting day of studies and sports. After the pony's identical-course dinner, Natalie and her father guides the animals back into their pens for the night. Natalie then continues her homework, watches a baseball match with her whole family ("Go, Bisons, Go!"), or plays games with her brothers. Shelby then joins the animals, after their bored fidgetings, into their individual journeys into their cloudy dreamlands.
Friday nights were somewhat different, as Natalie goes out in the evening to attend a baseball training session, and her brothers come out to stargaze into the dark sky with their neighbours. Occasionally, Shelby and Bimo can stay outside for just a while, within the former's locked-gate compound.
Saturdays were more different, as Natalie wakes up an hour earlier to jog outside with her brothers on the streets. where there is a row of pines beside the sidewalk. She then mucks out his stable pen, and with a brother's help, they carry it by wheelbarrrow across the field to a compost pile in the southeast, well away from sources of water (even sprinklers) and neighbours, and dumps the manure there. Leaves, twigs, and other stuff were also placed on it, along with the occasional artificial fertiliser, to speed up the process. In some Saturday nights, the Bjørnsons go out to Montchalons Stadium to see the Bisons pit themselves against various other teams and clubs, from the Durangos, to the Broncos, to the Cardinals-and-Torontos.
On Sundays, the Bjørnsons go to church up to noonday with the whole neighbourhood. They sometimes take five plastic boxes of "salsa-salad" some of the congregation prepared for post-service lunch. The nights were spent on more stargazing, hectic studying-and-revising, or radio listening.
However, a few months later, Shelby starts to periodically walk into the shady apple orchard, deep within his enclosure, and closer to the outermost fence and a dark forest. He starts to kick the apple trees to get their juicy treats, but unbeknownst to him, one of the trees has a nest, on which a little blue bird resides. As months pass into the next summer, this corvid can't take it anymore...
"Welcome to the Rīga International Airport," the attendant's voice chimed in. Moments of checking passed, and the Ozols (or Hughes) were taking their bags down the stairway, and into a canopy, under thunderstorm-ridden skies „Deja kāpj debesīs" plays from an old, rusty 1990's-dated speaker. Some passersby sing jolly folk songs.
"I hope this won't affect our Midsummer bonfire tonight," sighed (with his domestic British accent) Andrew Oscar Hughes, the "Director" of his own theatre company, as he ruffles rainwater from his auricomous hair.
His daughter, Victoria Gisella Hughes, murmured to herself in her grumpy, 16-year old mutterings, "I wanna go to Mumbai, not Jaungulbene."
They boarded an old-fashioned train for an eastward, two-hours-and-less-than-twenty-minutes trip to Gulbene, their ancestral hometown. As the train rumbled across green meadows and dim forests, riding though the thunder and rain, people sang their Midsummer tunes loudly and joyfully. Victoria was playing a videogame, sitting beside a window, to pass her time as her family sang her least favorite music.
Andrew peeled off a muffler from his daughter's right ear, saying, "Come on, girl, join in!"
She put her muffler back on and turned towards the raging thunder on the window, looking even more irritated.
It was a cloudy afternoon when they have reached the humble Jaungulbene Railway Station. As they went out of the antique hall, and into the entrance, they passed through a man was playing American country music with a banjo and an accordion - at the same time. Near them. A taxi has arrived at last, and after paying a little bit of money to the busker, they sped out of the railway station, past the old mansions, townhouses, and parks, and off to the Manor.
This town is something like a cross between an anachronistically-built English village, where almost every street has shady trees lining the way; and a Greek farming hamlet, where one end displays wheat fields and the other side has either a sports park here and there, or another wheat field. Pittoresque, n'est-ce pas ?
But Jaungulbene's crowning glory is a Tudor Neo-Gothic manor house, known formerly as the Schloss Neu-Schwanenburg, owned by Karl von Transehe up to A. D. 1920. It was also a former venue for a Soviet-era agricultural school.
The Ozols then have a photo session outside the Manor before their relatives took them off to a modest, electrically-powered cabin besides the Ušurs Lake. After the Ozols were welcomed, they left their bags in quaint rooms, buzzing with outdated fans and lit with only a simple chandelier in each room.
Just as Victoria was relaxing on the bottom of her bunk bed, her feet stretched out on the mattress, fighting the final boss after placing her luggage, chargers, and alarm clock—
Pew-pew-pew! Tsssst! Boom! Crash! SMASH! SLASH! Whoosh-swoosh-PEW! KA-BOOM!!!—
— "Victooooria~! It's time to make some cheese and breeead!", an aunt affectionately called. Her spaceship was blasted to scraps by the current level's boss, "the mothership of the (evil) Coalition". She then crossly turned off her console, put it beside her alarm clock, and proceeded to prepare for Midsummer....
(From Jay Mantri, http://pixabay.com/p-413770/?no_redirect)
(Updated 27 October, A. D. 2013.)
(Updated 11 November, A. D. 2013.)
(Updated 28 November, A. D. 2014.)
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