Amelia and Cecília are sisters. The first is eight years old and loves to draw. When it is the saint’s day or the birthday of a relative or friend, he always draws them. What he likes the most are animals. Paint a turtle, a dog, a horse, swallows, a piglet, a school of sardines or a cat. It has a trace. He makes very colorful drawings. At home they say she will be an illustrator when she grows up. The little one, Cecília, is six years old and spends the day with her head in the clouds.
Every evening after dinner they read a bedtime story. Sometimes one of the parents chooses a book and acts as a reader for both. Other times each takes her own. Amélia is a little girl of sorts, when it’s time to close her eyes to sleep, she asks for an idea to dream. First, the mother was in charge of looking for an idea: a beach, a farmhouse, a river… She was not very successful. Cecília immediately replaced her in this task. She offered him more encouraging images: a rabbit with big ears whose teeth have fallen out, a girl who went for a walk in the woods and found a roe deer… They say at home that, with this imagination, Cecília will be a writer . Every night, Amelia pulls the thread of the idea proposed by the little one and so she doesn’t think about the fear of the dark.
A few days ago at school, in the senior class, they were assigned to write an essay for the Sant Jordi competition. Amélia immediately thought of retrieving one of the images that Cecília had caught. If his ideas are good for dreaming, they must also be good for making a story, he thought. And he took the idea that had been given to him for the last dream: a whale has arrived tired on the sand and a family of ducks are approaching it. She has relived the dream, written the story and signed it with both of their names.
When it’s time to go to bed, Amélia says to her sister: Today I don’t need any ideas, tonight I’ll dream that tomorrow we win the prize for the best story.
Happy Saint George!
