The Raft

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I'll tell one story for now - the raft one, it's not even funny but I hope it's entertaining...

I think I was 7 when this happened and my brother was 8. Well, we lived (our parents still do) in country side and my uncle owns a farm with cows. So we grew up in the middle of the fields and woods, about 1,5km away from our home behind the fields was a river. Small enough for a grown up man to stand without his hips getting wet from the water when it was "a dry season". When the river flooded in spring we had no business in there because the stream was so strong and it would've been the end of our precious little lives.
When we were small we didn't have much money because our parents were young and they just finished building our house when I was six months old. So this meant that our mom always made our clothes from fabric and it was fine by us! The clothes were cool and unique :) One fine day our mom came home from the city and she had bought us both brand new jeans! It was the best surprise to us because we never had had pair of jeans and our friends at school had. Oh man the joy we had!

It was summer time and few weeks after she had bought us the jeans we put them on when our mom was outside probably gardening, I can't remember. We went to play outside in the fields and the forest near the river. Usually we played by the river, there we had a secret place where we had built up a "cottage" with branches and hay. And in the river by the cottage we had a raft. A real raft on which we could go to the other side of the river (river was 5-7meters wide) where the redcurrants grew wild and we always picked them with our parents. We had never taken the raft by ourselves before but my brother had been on it with our cousin who was maybe 3-4 years older than us. So he thought that he would have the same strength to get the raft back upstream after going down the river.

So we took the raft and went on a quite a while down the stream. But when we wanted to go back we didn't have enough strenght so that we could've pushed the raft back (we had small trees which we used as canes).

So my brother said that it can't be that deep, only 20cm (when we wisely measured it with the canes) and he rolled his jeans up to the knees and jumped to the water. Well, the water was almost up to his hips. So he climbed back on the raft and rolled his jeans as much as he could and jumped back. Now, being the bossy big brother he was he still had a bit of chivarly in his heart and he didn't expect me to jump on the water (which was very dirty and brown) to ruin my new jeans.
After a while, when he tried to pull and I tried to push the raft, we noticed we hadn't moved at all. So I rolled my jeans as much as I could and jumped to the water with him. This way we got the raft back, run back to home and tried to clean up the jeans. It didn't really help because the nice blue colour they had been - was all gone. They were dirty brown and while tried to figure out how to hide the expensive brand new jeans from our mom she walked in to the bathroom. She yelled at us about the jeans but we were happy that she yelled only a little and couldn't understand why she was more furious about us going on the raft just by the two of us than about ruining the jeans.

Lesson: Don't use your new jeans on your greatest adventures. 

But if you do – don't get caught.

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