User blog:Art Vandeleigh/Tales of my youth: Volume I

= Stealing Grapes from a Winery = For the most part, I was a mild-mannered boy growing up. Some days however, I'd give in to my meddlesome nature and organize some chaos. This was one such time.

When I was 11 years old me and two of my friends, named Varus and Felix, were itching to get out of school (Back then all schools were military boarding schools.) It had been about five months since we last left the walls of that academy. We had decided on breaking out during military exercise one day. We waited until the Fugere Hostes exercise (Pretty much just running through a forest, first one to make it out 'wins', although I forgot exactly what we won.) and booked it. We roamed the countryside for a few hours then found an overturned wagon. Felix had the bright idea to take off our sashes, and we rested in the wagon all night. Come morning, and we continue to wander. We didn't have a plan, but we saw a winery and we all looked at each other. We all knew what we were thinking.

We were hungry. I hopped the fence, picked as many grapes as my little arms could carry, and ran back, put them in a makeshift pouch made from Varus' sash, and repeat the process until we had enough grapes. We decided it was time to go back after that, but before we did we wanted to cut through a forest on the way back. What we didn't know was that the forest was home to Greek bandits. With Sun at our crown and eventually at our backs, we frolicked through the forest. A man with a Kopis (sword) saw us and walked up. He spoke Greek. I was still learning, but Felix was Greek, so they had a short conversation and the man pointed us out of the forest. I asked Felix what they talked about, and he I'll never forget what he said.

"He said he had grapes stolen from his vineyard and that he's had enough of the bandits living in these woods."