The difficult slope. That’s what I named it. It was two hundred meters away from my house. Just a cut in the ground, an ascending wall of mud delimiting a sunny field of daisies from the shady forest of cypresses that crowned our side of t…

The use of mobile phones has become widespread among the youngest members of our society. This undeniable fact, partially triggered by the nature of the modern market, has aroused the worries of teachers and therapists and has initiated a …

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority… Children are now tyrants… They contradict their parents… and tyrannize their teachers.” Socrates (469–399 B.C.) Some elders say they don’t recognize this world; …

That was an odd meeting: my middle sister, her childhood sweetheart, my aunt Encarnita, and I, on a windy summer afternoon, borrowing my father's rickety van and going for no reason to one of the most hostile beaches of the region. Sometim…

Don Gonzalo was the name of the feared Spanish teacher that we got in sixth grade. He was not exactly a Spanish teacher himself, though he was definitely Spanish; I mean, from Spain. What I am trying to say is that his professional field w…

Summer breaks, those unending periods of time in my childhood days, three long months of sun and waves during which alarm clocks, teachers and rain boots were a vague memory, almost non-existent. That natural border between the fourth and …

If I could change one thing about my hometown it would be the road that divided it in two. I grew up in a small village on the northwestern Mediterranean coast. It was one of those holiday spots full of people in summer and empty for the r…

Childhood is a crucial part of our lives. The first thirteen years of our existente is the gap of time in which we’ll get to know the world and we’ll learn its structures and, most importantly, the strategies and different ways to survive …