* CHILDHOOD *

Writers and philosophers call childhood the happiest time in human life. Carried away by this assertion, we might think facing an unhappy time in life, such as old age, is inevitable. However, people's views of life do not allow talking about it with such certainty. It would be a gross mistake to judge people's outlook on life from the mind's perspective, by which man is only happy in his childhood, that is, while he does not know about death.
 There was no opposition from one life period to another for a Russian peasant. Life for him was a whole thing. This unity is based not on permanency but on a constant and inevitable change. The boundary between childhood and infancy is unclear, as it is unclear when changing, for example, night and morning, spring and summer, the creek and the river. And yet, despite this uncertainty, they exist separately: the night and morning, the brook, and the river.
     It is best to think that childhood begins when a person can remember himself. But again, when does it really start? Smells, sounds, a play of sun rays recalled from infancy. (Some people seriously claim that they remember how they were born.)
By peasant's ways, you're not a baby anymore if you are weaned from the maternal breast. But some "babies" were breastfed up to the age of five. After that, breastfeeding was interrupted by the prospect of another child.
    Maybe weaning from the maternal breast is the first severe hardship in life. Is it not a tragedy for a little human being when he is full of expectation and confidence to mother, once clung to the nipple, smeared with mustard? The culmination of infancy was considered when the children learned to walk and get their first clothes and shoes. The ability to ignore unpleasant and horrific things (e.g., death) is probably the main feature of childhood. But this does not mean that the grievances of childhood are forgotten quickly. On the contrary, the child's soul absorbs equally greedy the evil and the good, the evil and the good impressions remembered equally vividly for life. But evil and sound do not change places in the peasant view of the world, unlike the yolks and whites in the egg; they are never mixed.
 The atmosphere of kindness around a child was considered mandatory. It did not mean pampering and indulging. The steady, kind attitude of the adult toward a child does not contradict accountability and strictness, which grew gradually. As mentioned, the degree of responsibility before society and the physical load at work and in games depended on age. They grew slowly, imperceptibly, but steadily, not only from year to year but maybe with each day. The didactic and forceful imposition of good habits caused bitterness, resistance, and opposition in the children's hearts. If the boy is being dragged by the hand into the fields, he will obey. But what's the use of such obedience? Nothing is forced to do; the child himself wants to work. Adults just wisely protect him from the crushing workload.
A typical child's desire for imitation immeasurably enriches education more than coercion. A personal example of the behaviour of adult life (grandparents, parents, siblings) stood in front of the child's inner eye. Is that why in good families rarely, very rarely come out bad people? The family has been instilled in childhood immunity to moral artifice.
 The world of childhood has expanded rapidly and every day. Then, a person was finally leaving the lived-in, familiar to the last twig crib, and the whole room became an everyday three-dimensional world.
    Behind the stove, under the stove, in the scullery, behind the cupboard, under the table and under the benches - all were studied, and everything was familiar. You are not allowed only into the trunks, cabinets and the shrine.
    In the summer, you are to new discoveries. The whole house becomes a sphere of habitual, maternal, and usual. The house (summer and winter), hay attic, upper floor, a tower (loft), county, barn, basement and all kinds of nooks and crannies. And after that, the whole street, and the entire village... Field, forest, river, and mill, where kids went with grandfather to grind flour ...
    The first night away from home, finally, the first visit to another village - all this is the first time. In childhood, as in other periods, no spring or fall was like the previous ones. After all, each year of a child's life meant something new. If you were allowed to simmer only in shallow water last year, swimming where deeper water is now possible. Thousands of such changes, innovations, and more complex skills, games, and customs had been experienced in his childhood; everyone would remember them and, of course, become familiar with them in their own children.
     Children's memories are always concrete and shaped, but everybody remembers something more, something less. So, for example, if the talk is about spring, almost all remember the feelings associated with spring tasks.
Take out of the internal window frames, and the house became brighter and fresher. The street is peering directly into the house. Set up the birdhouse with the father, grandfather or elder brother. Drain water (building dams, ditches, toy windmills). Lower the boat on the water. Grease boots with tar and dry them in the sun. Collect ants and distill the ant spirit. Undercut birch bark (for collecting and drinking birch sap). Forage the first mushrooms and crocuses. Harvest sorrel. The first game in the street. The first angling trip…
     In summer, children have faced so many things that some were lost with joy, did not know where to rush, and did not have time to experience all that fun to learn.
The play was alternated with easy work or merged with it, and valuable merged\ with pleasure quietly and firmly. A playful element in the work process, first tested in childhood, remained in many kinds of compulsory labour, if not for life, but for very long. All of these wigwams on the meadows, huts in the forest, fishing, campfires with baking potatoes, mushrooms, perch, horse riding - all of this transpassed to subsequent stages of life with a fair amount of play, child's fun
 A certain intangible edge in the transition from one state to another, sometimes the opposite, is the most exciting thing in childhood. Children are the most refined connoisseurs of such elusive- natural conditions. But even adults know that the most delicious potatoes are slightly crunched on the verge of raw and baked. Okroshka (Cold soup with kvas(a drink from fermented rye bread ) suddenly acquires a unique charm when something hot is dropped. 
    A child feels a strange pleasure, dropping snow into boiling water. A towel brought in from the cold into a warm house smells like something in particular; the blackness of the bath in the oven and the dazzling dawn in the window create an unusual atmosphere. Fractions of a second before jumping over the obstacle, a moment when the swing is moving upward but is about to begin the reverse movement, the moment before a hunter shoots, before falling into water or straw - all this creates a strange rapture of happiness and fullness of life. A sound of cracking and deflection of the thin autumn ice under the ice skates when all passes over again, and no one falls into the cold depths of the pool. 
A premonition of what the suddenly immobile float will just now disappear from the water's surface! This moment is the most beautiful in angling fish. And is not the most wonderful; is not the most thrilling love on the brink of childhood and youth in this brief and too elusive time?
In the autumn, harvest time is particularly pleasing to play hide and seek between sheaves and among the stacks, ride horses, make holes in large piles of straw, heat the barn stove, climb elderberry trees, chew turnips, munch peas ...
    And the first ice on the river opened hundreds of new experiences and opportunities for children. So the winter brings up kids; it's no less fun than the summer.
 After getting frozen on the river or in the snow, how nice it is to climb onto the stove close to the grandfather and fall asleep without hearing his story till the end! And cry if you missed something interesting. And happily calm down after the paternal or maternal affection. The temperature contrast appropriate for a child's body, repeated with the increase, has always been the foundation of physical conditioning; it was nothing for the five-year-old child to jump out of the hot bathhouse into the snow.
But children in good families were also protected from psychological contrasts.
    Tender care was not necessarily explicit, but it manifested itself everywhere. Here are some examples. When the old stove is removed ( to make a new one), someone will make a baby bird out of clay for a child; when slaughtering a sheep or calf, they will undoubtedly condition and blow the animal's bladder, put into it a few peas (a dried bladder turned into a children drum). If the father is carpentering, he necessarily chops small blocks for children. When the kholodetz (calves' foot jelly) is boiled, the boys get particular bones ("babki"), and the girls get ankles. The hunter gives a child a fluffy white rabbit's tail tied to a thread every time.
     When beer is brewed, the children trooped to gnaw stones. At the end of the summer, children have a particular pea lot in the garden. Returning from the woods, everyone tries to bring the kids a gift from a fox, hare or bear.
Giving a ride to a child on a sled or a cart was considered optional but desirable. They were woven, tiny baskets and buckets for children, and made small rakes, scythes, etc.
 In addition to general foods, children's sweets were distributed by age and merit. Some of such homemade, rather than purchased, treats were apples, bones (during cooking jelly), "yagodnitsa" (pressured blueberries or strawberries in milk), and foam from the baked ("roasted," as they say) milk. When oatmeal is cooked on the fire, a delicious crisp foam rolls on a stirring wooden wand and gives it to the children. Grilled potatoes, onions, turnips, carrots, berries, birch juice, peas - all that was available to children, as they say, by an unwritten law. But following the law was not always exciting.
Therefore, stealing vegetables and apples counted first among the classic childish mischiefs. Another grievous sin has been destroying birds' nests; those engaged were rare and incorrigible. Forbidden was thought to watch how people eat or drink tea in somebody's house (such children were called "vislyatyu" (snoopers)). However, giving someone else's child a treat from their table was considered normal.
A special place in the child's soul occupied pets: a horse, cow, calf, dog, cat, and rooster. All except the rooster had different names, characters, and good or bad qualities, in which children were dealt with superbly. Sometimes, adults are assigned to a child an individual animal, so to speak, to take personal care of.