THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WELL

Chapter 20 – page 5

Julio worked hard at cleaning up his sword, using rust remover, steel wool, and finally plain old bacon grease worked the best, with a dab of WD 40. His shield was in perfect condition since it had been hanging in an inside room of the mountain. They both are hanging on his wall to this day.

Of course, Julio’s prize possession was Cool, who he turned into a rather nice critter. Trained him up in the way he should go and he didn’t depart from it. He did get rather big tho’, but Julio also taught him to bow down, be ridden, and to pull a cart. One of G’s main concerns tho was for feed and a barn for him. So Julio came up the next summer and built a barn for Cool, with the help of Granma. Cool didn’t need shoes since his feet were perfectly shaped, hard, and never grew bigger or chipped up at all. And after school, Julio got several odd jobs: throwing out newspapers, babysitting cats and dogs, taking out people’s trash, and cutting grass, etc, to earn money which he sent to Granma to help with Cool’s hay and grain. This was of course when he was still eight years old, before he started selling his frogs, T-shirts and rap CD.

When Granma was going through the baskets to clean them out, she found a couple more mango and avacado pits, and a few dried up papaya seeds. She threw them in the compost pile and you can imagine, lo and behold, next Spring they were sprouting, yes indeedy. So her fruit patch doubled in size around the fish pond, creating her very own tropical paradise.