City our countryside?

Yes, what was it like? - by Maik

At first, there was a dream – like in the old stories. 

I was born and grew up in a small town with about 24.000 habitants. Many of my relatives, cousins, aunts and uncles, my grandmothers and grandfather, however, lived in the countryside in a village with only about 300 residents, ca. 15 km away. This was where I would have liked to live, but where I only could visit once a week and partly during the summer holidays. I always dreamed of living in this small village. 

Nearby the village was a valley where there used to be a big sheep pen back then. From time to time you could see “unimaginably many” sheep there. And I imagined what it would be like if my father and I were shepherds and roamed the countryside every day, together with a dog and the sheep. 

Then almost 4 eventful decades passed, until many kilometers away from the village from my childhood, 4 Cameroon sheep stood in a hastily built pen. And it took 2 more years for the Cameroon sheep to move out and the Herdwicks to move in.

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