dark secret

Dear friends of piano music,

today I will tell you one of my darkest secrets: I ate my playmates as a child. However, not on purpose. and it happened like this: my grandparents were trained farmers and when they finally arrived in their new home they continued their old lives at least a little bit by growing lots of fruit and vegetables in the garden and keeping chickens and rabbits. My sister and I played with the rabbits, we named them and took care of them. We even personally checked the quality of their food - it was ok, actually didn't taste that bad. However, we only tried the dry food, not the greens that they got from the garden, here we relied on Mother Nature, so to speak. My grandma usually cooked for everyone when I was small, and of course there was plenty of meat, it must have been the kitchen of the years of the economic boom, when you built up a little reserve for any further bad times. And I really had a blessed appetite as a kid. When it came to a certain type of meat, we children were assured that it was veal, which we believed at firsts. But of course we quickly linked it to the sudden disappearance of our favorite bunnies. "Is that Julia?" screamed my sister in horror. Well, what was there to deny? For my grandmother, slaughtering animals and eating their flesh was the most natural thing in the world. In war they would probably have starved if they hadn't secretly slaughtered and eaten a pig every now and then, a family can survive for a while on a big pig. I myself have stopped eating meat recently, but of course I don't dictate it to anyone in my family. And I can't imagine a committed vegetarian who wouldn't slaughter an animal himself if his child was threatened with certain starvation. That's not what it's all about, the point that concerns me is rather: Should one hide the truth from others in order to protect them? Of course, my grandparents knew that we would be very sad and would probably never have happily eaten our furry friends. However, we were no longer quite so small and stupid that we hadn't figured it out on our own. Over the years, a few more dark secrets came to light that my grandparents had kept from us, not something they would have done themselves, but bad things they themselves had to experience. This made me anxious, because on the one hand I understand well the intention to protect the other, but the trust has turned a little to distrust - is there more that I don't know? Are they perhaps terminally ill and not telling me? I do not know,. what you think about it, but I'm not very good at handling it, I rather value trust and openness. Of course, you under no circumstances should burden small children with such terrible things, I completely agree with my grandparents here. But adults? Isn't it better to be honest and share bad things too? What do you all mean?

Kerstin