One morning, Mother shook me out of my sleep, scolding:
— Up with you, lazybones, before the sun is up! Or do you want the Armenian cuckoo to kiss you again and jinx you, so nothing goes right for you all day?
For that was how Mother used to trick us, with a hoopoe that had nested for many years in a very old, hollow linden tree on the hillside, at Uncle Andrei's — my father's youngest brother. All summer long you could hear her: "Pu-pu-pup! Pu-pu-pup!", at the crack of dawn, every single day, till the whole village rang with it.
And no sooner was I up than Mother sent me off with food for some spoon-makers we had hired to hoe our field, all the way out in the Dry Valley, near Topolița.