고등학교 공통영어1 (미래엔 김성연) 연계 글

Over winter break, I read a long novel set in a remote mountain village in a country I had never visited. The author described the village so vividly that I felt as if I were climbing its steep stone streets. By the last page, I was sure that I knew exactly how long its winters were.

In March, a new student named Alma joined our class. Our homeroom teacher mentioned that Alma had grown up in the country where the novel is set. At lunch, I carried the book to Alma's desk as if I were the tour guide and she were the visitor. I talked about the stone streets and the bells that rang at sunset. Then I asked her how long the snow usually stayed on the ground in her town.

Alma turned a few pages and smiled politely. "It's a lovely story," she said, "but I have never seen a village like this one." She had grown up on the ninth floor of an apartment building in a busy city, where buses passed under her window all night. My cheeks flushed when I realized that I had been explaining her own country to her.

Alma did not seem to mind, though. She told me how tiny her grandmother's bakery on the first floor was and how early the smell of bread reached the ninth floor each morning. She described her grandmother's warm kitchen as if it were only a few steps away from our classroom. Every Sunday, her grandmother had let her shape the dough into small rolls. Alma still carried her grandmother's handwritten recipe card in her pencil case. Then she asked me what my own street was like.

The novel had shown me the landscape of a whole village, but it could not show me Alma's Sunday mornings. Now when I open the book, I picture two places at once: the stone streets on the page and a warm bakery nine floors below a city window. Next week, Alma is going to teach me how to shape the rolls.