Chapter 3
Episode 3gandras saugo nuo gyvates ba
The summer I turned eleven, my grandmother took me to the edge of the marsh where the storks nested. She said the old birds knew things we had forgotten—how to fold time into their wings, how to read the weather in the reeds. I didn’t understand then, but I followed her because the path was soft and the air smelled of rain and rust.
We stood beneath a crooked pole where a nest sagged like a woven basket. A stork stood guard, its beak aimed at something I couldn’t see. My grandmother pointed: a grass snake, coiled in the shadow of a stone. The stork did not move. It simply waited, patient as a statue, until the snake slithered away.
“That’s how you learn,” she said. “Not by fighting, but by standing still and knowing when to strike.”
I thought of the rose-tinted glasses I had stopped wearing. The world was sharper now, full of edges and shadows. But my grandmother’s voice was a kind of glass too—one that let me see the snake without flinching.
That night, I sat on the porch with a book I had borrowed from the library. It was a thick, yellowed thing about programming in C++. I didn’t understand most of the words, but I liked the way the letters lined up like soldiers. I told myself I could learn. The book was an answer, a private code. My grandmother’s stork stood in my mind, watching over me as I turned each page.
The snake would come again, I knew. But maybe I would be ready.