A Sheltered Age

For this week’s writing challenge, we’re asking you to explore what age means to you. Is the loss of youth, or the cultivation of wisdom? Do things get better as you grow older, or worse? There are many ways to interpret age, often depending on your relationship with the passing of time.

They lived near a farm by a hill and an old oak tree. There were no cities, no busy roads just one street of houses with gardens. The street was a dead end, and stopped at a field with a view of never ending fields.
These children spent their days climbing the old oak tree.  Listening to the wind from a den in the hedgerows and playing made up games. No separation of society existed, no wealth dictated.  They played from morning til dusk in holidays and weekends and after dinner on school days. The youngest were cared for by the oldest and no jealousy, bigotry or bias existed. Hand in hand they stayed together harmoniously with laughter and  joy to be heard by the neighbours at their creations of go carts, roller skating, and teaching the young ones to ride a bike.
Years passed, some families moved house. Older children went to college or working and pandemonium ensued as societies world invaded their lives with heartache, disappointment, failure, depression, anxieties and turns of dilemmas. Their world did not exist with such irreverence and their abilities to master the human negativities had not been passively aquired in early years.  Where was the compassion for your playmates now? The care for your juniors? The passion for all to be happy?  Life infiltrated their existance with a world of experiences childhood had not exposed.  The world seemed hard with no hand to always pull you higher up the tree. Push you further up the hill and shout with you louder in the skating ride to below.
But adult life teaches us to move onwards and those childhood years mean that we know to seek true friends,  a well meant gesture, and an extended hand means possibility. The childhood years are always there to remember the street with a view of a hill and a tree and memories of listening to the wind in a hedge and being of the meadow gang society.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Perspective