Atlast: the pink box E-Book

Paula Barini Mazzola

• Herausgeber: Atequenfim
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 160

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

"Atlast, the Awakening of a Pink Box" is a children's book - the first book of a trilogy. It is written for children, ages 7 to 10. It is an autobiographical fable, written by Paula Mazzola. Synopsis: Clara is a seven-year-old girl whose family is well-off. The story's setting is her grandparents' homestead, called "Atlast." This farm allows her the freedom to roam and let her imagination soar as she observes nature's wonders. On the homestead, Clara enjoys the fragrance of flowers and the flavor of various fruits and vegetables. She observes insects in the garden, and animals raised by her grandparents. She collects a variety of bugs and other insects and takes good care of them. The story becomes more elaborate and metaphoric when describing a dream of Clara's. The dream sequence is set inside the pink wooden box her grandfather gave to her for her birthday to keep her insect collection in. In this dream, Clara suddenly turns into a caterpillar and finds herself trapped inside this box. In order to free herself, she will have to transform into a butterfly, so she can escape from the box by flying through a crack in the lid. The story becomes amusing. Each little bug in the box has its own features and personality. Each helps little Clara in this new phase of her life. She experiences the life of an insect first-hand. She understands the joy they feel, as well as grief brought on by loss and parting. She learns many valuable lessons by living with other insects: patience, perseverance, encouragement, togetherness, friendship, authenticity, flexibility, fear of the unknown, presence, diversity, enchantment, spirituality, magic, faith and acceptance. At the end, an unexpected outcome awaits! "Atlast" is a book not only for children, but an inspiration for grown-ups as well. It is a valuable resource for adults searching not only for their inner child, but their genuine and unique identity. It assists in awakening the purest qualities of their own essence, through memory and fantasy. Paula Mazzola is a psychopedagogist, an equotherapist, a social entrepreneur, and an author. She specializes in childhood education. Ms. Mazzola manages social-environmental and educational projects. She created the "PICNIC" tool and founded ASTERA Initiative. She works with ONG's (Non-Governmental Organizations). She develops social projects and consultation services in various Brazilian states – specializing in social inclusion, connection with nature, organic agriculture, and diversity and sustainability. She participates in various courses, forums, and self-knowledge conferences, held nationally and internationally. A few of these include conferences on mindfulness, spirituality, and childhood education in schools integrated with nature. "Atequenfim" (Atlast, The Awakening of a Pink Box) is her first children's book and also the first book of a trilogy. It is an autobiographical fable.

Leseprobe

All rights reserved

Paula Barini Mazzola

Publishing

Paula Barini Mazzola ME

Translation

Mônica Haberer, Evelise Guioto, Rosa Maria Carvalho

Illustrated by

Patricia Siqueira Sper

Cover, graphic project and layout

Bia Gomes

Logo design

Cris Duarte

São Paulo, SP – Brasil (2019)

www.atequenfim.com.br

1st Edition

Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP)(Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brasil)

Mazzola, Paula

atlast [livro eletrônico] : the pink box / Paula Mazzola ; ilustraçtion Patrícia Sper ; [tradução da autora]. -- São Paulo : Edição do autor, 2019.

4.494 Kb ; ePUB

ISBN 978-65-900263-4-7

1. Literatura infantojuvenil em inglês

I. Sper, Patrícia. II. Título.

19-24473

CDD-028.5

Índices para catálogo sistemático:

1. Literatura infantil em inglês 028.5

2. Literatura infantojuvenil em inglês 028.5

Iolanda Rodrigues Biode - Bibliotecária - CRB-8/10014

My name is Clara. I turned seven today.

I live in a cozy house in a quiet neighborhood in the city of São Paulo.

My mom has prepared a super-fun party for me!

The cake was lovingly baked by a British lady who lives in the neighborhood, a true artist! It was delicious and my favorite flavor, too: caramel filled chocolate cake, topped with a very colorful frosting!

When we celebrate our birthdays, my family always jumps in to prepare for the party. My aunt, my mom’s sister, is the one who makes the chocolate truffles, a very big deal for our birthday parties. My aunt’s truffles are the best in the whole wide world!

Today my cousins and I got to roll them, smearing our hands and the corners of our lips with butter and chocolate sprinkles, which also ended up scattered all over the table and kitchen floor. My puppy stood still, waiting for a chance to catch them.

The boys’ task was to blow up the balloons.

– all of a sudden, they popped one and scared all of us daydreamers! The boys had a blast. They did it on purpose to spook us!

The house was set up for the party. Furniture was dragged to the corners so we could have more room to play. Colorful and cheerful paintings on the glass doors leading to the garden prevented us children from running into them. A neighbor friend of my mom’s painted them. Such protective measure worked to protect grownups, too - it happens more often than you’d think!

The invitations were written one by one, with scented pens, and then delivered to each of my dear guests: my classmates and their siblings, my cousins, my ballet classmates and neighbors down the street – it’s a pretty small street so we all know each other.

Today, they all swarmed to my party. Music, theater performances, fun activities, and games, such as hide-and-seek, tug of war have been prepared with the greatest love in the world: my mom’s love.

Everyone loves the parties at my house – they are really fun!

Off to the Farm

As the last guest left, my dad rushed to pack the car trunk as if he were putting together a jigsaw puzzle. He filled it up with things we were taking on the trip: not just totes and bags, but empty bottles and crates to be filled up with milk, fruit, eggs, and vegetables during the weekend.

My mom cleaned up while I put my presents away. I was so delighted with all those gifts I wish I could play with all of them at the same time.

My brother, who is almost six years older than me, let out my dog, a grumpy female schnauzer with a large mustache, after her having been locked in the laundry room during the entire party. She was desperate to pee in the garden and was very happy she was going on a car ride.

So, at last, we set off to my paternal grandparents’ farm in Porto Feliz, a little town in state of São Paulo. A long and warm hug awaited us along with, of course, some delicious dinner.

Everytime we travel, I usually come up with ideas to kill time: I peek at the houses that quickly pass by my window and imagine myself inside of them, talking to the people and smelling the food being cooked; I also imagine what the residents are like and what the bedrooms and the kitchen look like.

My grandfather taught me another way to entertain myself: watching the shape of white clouds floating in the blue sky. When it’s dark, I gaze at the moon following the car, like in a race. Sometimes the moon is in front of us; sometimes it’s behind us, and other times it is right on top of our heads - the moon is always around.

When it rains, I watch raindrops run down the windshield, one drop linking to another and forming a water worm that runs down then disappears. Not at this time, though, because the night sky was clear and beautiful!

– I suddenly woke up, startled, when my brother poked and pinched me, and we started a real war for room in the back seat. A quiet battle, so that my dad wouldn’t figure out what was going on. When we disturbed him, all he had to do was look through the rearview mirror. We’d freeze at the message: “Knock it off!”

After traveling for an hour and a half – a real long time, if you ask me – we turned left onto the old bumpy rough road I know so well. I jumped from the back seat onto my dad’s lap right away. He often lets me drive “by myself” - if it’s daytime, anyhow… I was proud of myself. My face stuck to the steering wheel, I focused, swerving to avoid the potholes, turning right on the dirt road. We quickly arrived at the farm gate. I pretended not to notice when my dad slyly helped me turn the steering wheel with the tip of his fingers.

Had I been in my own seat while driving along the dirt road, I’d watch as the back of the car kicked up a cloud of dust, and our blue car would become brown! And if I stuck my face out the window, the same would happen to my teeth: I’d smile as I felt little sand grains cracking in my mouth. Oh, how I love this! Feeling the wind on my face and imagining myself in a racing boat in the open sea!

At the gate, a rustic wood sign hanging from a lamppost said ATLAST FARM.

Yes, the name of the farm is spelled like that: the words stuck together, like in a bear hug, In poor Portuguese, it represented my grandparents whispering “WHEW!”, a cheerful sigh of relief from them when they finally managed to afford their homestead, their dream house, the place they chose to live in… Such is the story they told me!

We crossed the gate and drove a bit further on a side road lined with magnificent gum trees, barbed-wire fence and stone posts that surrounded the milk cows pastures. There was also an old “retired” mule called Golden.

Many times, I’d rush out of the car right at the gate, I’d take my shoes off and walk barefoot the rest of the path. I like the feeling of the sand and the little chill of the stones – sometimes, a pointy pebble would poke my foot, hurting it, but I’d just rub it a little and move on.

After it rained it was even more fun: the wet soil formed mud puddles and stepping in them filled me with joy. It’s a singular feeling that you can only understand if you actually experience that muck crawling between your toes!

Jumping in puddles, watching the wind shake gum trees and seeing their leaves dancing to its sound… using their fallen branches as walking sticks, the smell of eucalyptus as if in a sauna, the way their seeds resemble tiny little church bells… It was all a big fun game for me!

At last, when we got to the main house, I rushed out of the car and my dogs jumped on me as if they hadn’t seen me in ages – even my little dog that had sat next to me all the way from São Paulo seemed to want to welcome me; she must have been jealous of the big farm dogs! They are my faithful adventure buddies!

My uncles and aunts had already arrived. I climbed onto my tall and cuddly grandpa’s lap; granny squeezed me in a tight hug. What an amazing way to end my birthday!

The Farm

At the farm, there is a vegetable garden, an orchard, there are cows, and hens; there is a big, plain, yet very cozy house and hammocks spread all over the area under the garden pergola, where I love to swing, even upside down. There are trees, bushes, dirt roads, animals, butterflies, bees, horse flies and a lot more. There is also a little river, a hidden grotto, my grandpa’s workshop, and a sugarcane juicer.

At dawn and dusk, my uncle brings the cows from the pastures to the barn to be milked and cleaned. He calls them by their names – some of them have people’s names! All of them mind him and come right away, crossing the gate in a row. My job is to pour the bran among the feeding troughs. I love to add water and play with the mix, smearing the slimy feed all the way up to my elbows.

Cows are pretty smart animals. They will stand just on the right spot where they can eat while we gently tie them up to be milked. Learning how to milk a cow was fun and it took quite a lot of squirtings for me to manage to get the milk into the bucket! With time and lots of practice, though, I eventually got the hang of it, and yet sometimes I’d “accidentally” spray milk on people helping me. “Oops! I’m sorry!”, I’d always say, pretending to be surprised while they wiped milk off their face, not realizing I’d done it on purpose.

Sometimes I bring a mug with cocoa from the kitchen, I squirt fresh milk straight from the cow into my mug, and drink it right there. Its natural foam prints a huge mustache on my face!

After the cows are let out of the barn, I wash the barn with a big hose. Barns usually smell like milk, manure and animal feed, but after a good washing, it gets so squeaky clean that you could even have a meal in it. All of this is truly great fun!

The cows at the farm are so happy that they have even received a national award for milk production. They produce so much milk that my grandma, who is a great cook, fills the kitchen with homemade cheese, butter and yogurt, which then she sells all over the county!

In the chicken coop, all the hens are said to be red. I don’t understand why they are called red, actually they look very brown to me. They calmly go about scratching the soil once they are confined to an enclosed area where they are protected from predators. I feed them and carefully collect their eggs every day.

I’ve learned that eggs, right after they are laid, are soft and warm; only after they cool down do their shells become rigid and easy to break. Fun fact: If you hold an egg between your thumb and forefinger and squeeze the top and bottom of it, you’ll see it’s unbreakable, you can use as much pressure as you want, it won’t break. I never managed to break one! If you squeeze them on the wrong spot, though…

The little chicks have a place of their own in the chicken coop. From time to time, my grandma buys lots of chicks and takes care of them until they become old enough to lay eggs. There’s a huge round structure on the roof with colorful light bulbs to keep them warm.

I like poached eggs, soft scrambled eggs, and fried eggs, sunny side up!

Whenever I find a dead animal, such as a bird, an insect or any other animal, I make sure they get an actual funeral: I use a matchbox or a shoebox as a coffin, I stick a cross made of interwoven twigs in the soil to mark the burial place and I perform a proper ritual with prayers and flowers, to bless their passage into the afterlife.

My aunt loves fishing in the river and I always help her to bait the hook. But I’m sorry for the worms and the little fish so, when she isn’t looking, I place the worms back into the soil and absentmindedly let the fish jump back into the river.

“Another fish escaped?!” She says. “Oh, sweetie, keep an eye on them for me, please” she always asks me. Then she turns back and throws the bait again into the river. I smile and wink at the few fish left in the bucket - and wait for the first opportunity to let them go, too. Sometimes, my aunt gets upset, but only for a little while; she soon forgets all about it and takes me fishing with her again.

She always tells stories of how she saved my life twice when I was about three years old. The first time, I thought I was picking up a worm, when in fact it was a baby python about to bite me! The second time, perhaps out of curiosity, I had put a worm in my mouth thinking it was spaghetti! I still remember the taste of dirt and my aunt’s finger fishing the poor thing out of my throat. YUCK!

The highest spot at the farm is on the way to the orchard. You can find a lot of stones there. I like to pick a variety of shapes to make little sculptures. Round ones, sharp ones and different-sized ones are good to create animals, such as turtles, giraffes, and so on. All I have to do is glue the stones together with some sort of sticky putty that is a little like play dough. After a couple of days, the glue goes rigid and I can paint my sculptures. When my production is big enough, I put together my own sales stand by the gate of the farm to sell the sculptures to people passing by. Once, I found out that my other grandma – in fact, she’s my uncle’s mother who always comes to the farm on holidays – hides behind the ranch gate in order to watch and protect me. The cars always stop by and people buy my sculptures.

There are a lot of trees in the orchard, so we always have different kinds of fruit, no matter the season. My grandma has built a big compost pile to help trees grow strong. She uses leftovers, cow manure, chicken droppings and whatever other organic materials she can find to prepare a powerful fertilizer. The farm isn’t very big but it’s big enough to grow different species of trees.

There are apple trees, pear trees, peach trees, grape vines, orange trees. Mulberry trees are special, the berries stain the soles of my feet, my fingertips and my mouth! I squeeze the mulberries and their leaves to make tea for my family. I love crushing mulberries to make purple ink. Then I find twigs to use as paintbrushes and draw on paper, on the floor or on little pebbles. I make real works of art! I also make my own stamps by dipping fruit, leaves or stones in the purple mulberry ink and then press them onto paper, stamping amazing patterns.

When it’s peach season, the peach trees look like Christmas trees. We wrap each fruit in a paper bag, to protect them from birds, bees and other bugs. And when they are ripe, we open the little packages as if they were gifts and savour the peaches as if they were treats.

The month I like best is December: it’s when lychees are in season. Originally from China, lychees have a hard red skin but have a white, soft and sweet pulp inside. We only have two of those trees at the farm – these lush trees have leaves that reach down to the ground. When it’s lychee season, I eat lots of them so I remember their taste until they are available again next year.

The amazing jabuticaba trees are typically Brazilian. Such beauty emanates from those delicate and peaceful trees… There’s a time for every step of fruition: a time to blossom, a time to flourish, a time to produce fruit, a to resettle and rest – each time, a transformation.

One morning the tree is all bloomy with fragrant flowers spread all over its trunk and branches. White flowers create harmonious colors with the yellow and black of the bees and butterflies, as they pollinate them. Within a week, shiny little balls appear where the flowers had been and transform the trees. Previously brown, the stems are now all covered with sparkling green marbles. Soon they turn violet, as if nature has painted the marbles with brushstrokes and, eventually, they turn into shiny black balls, contrasting with the bright green color of the leaves.

The beauty of the jabuticaba trees attracts little birds, all kinds of bugs and people. Everyone enjoys the life and sweetness that jabuticabas provide. There is enough for everybody! From the bottom, close to the roots, up to the highest branch at the very top of the tree and its tiniest branches, the fruit covers every single spot of the tree stems – those little black balls that burst in our mouth with a that makes eating them so much fun! Because I eat so much, when I close my eyes to sleep, I keep seeing jabuticabas even in my dreams.

Lima oranges are also one of my favorite fruit. As I find it difficult to peel them, I have come up with a couple of strategies: the first one is squeezing it well from all sides and then drilling a hole with a pointy twig to suck the juice from it. The second is a lot easier, especially for me: I choose a grown-up, preferably my uncle, who is really skillful, and I ask him to sit underneath the tree. Then I climb the tree to reach the oranges at the top, and he peels them for me. The top oranges are always the sweetest, I can eat more than ten at once!

What about the tamarinds? It’s hard to tell when they are ripe… And they are so sour anyway, they make me pucker! Yikes! I get goosebumps just thinking of it! Mangoes we have on the farm usually have strings. They leave so many strings between my teeth that I prefer to go to my neighbor’s backyard and get some of the smooth, stringless mangoes they have there. I crawl under the fence when no one is looking. Our neighbors are our friends and they definitely wouldn’t mind, but the sense of adventure makes the mangoes taste even better!

Have you ever tried green persimmons? They taste like green unripe bananas! When you bite them, it feels like your mouth is sucking back. You can’t say it’s good, but it sure is fun to watch other people try it!

When the trees have no fruit I just take a green leaf in my hands and I crumple it so I can smell the fruit that will be there later. This is how I handle my craving for it until I can actually taste that fruit again. I inhale so deeply I can almost taste it!

My grandpa has built a life sized dollhouse for me, his only granddaughter. It’s made of actual bricks and painted white with red doors and windows. It has a kitchen sink and a laundry tub with real running water, a garden and a porch with a small hammock where I love to swing.