Manfria, when Sicily leaves a 'mark'

It took about twenty minutes, I think.
All five of us were in a dark green Fiat 124 and from the Gela apartment we arrived at the house in Manfria.
Whether it was for the weekend or for most of the summer, my brothers and I had our bikes for company anyway.
The uneven ground next to the holiday home I guess forced my father to a more well-made path, while my brother and I, on the saddles of our vehicles, were like squirrels in the trees.
And so, with that almost hungry desire not to stand still but rather to run around or splash around in the warm Mediterranean, Manfria was for us like a great good dog that as children is always taken advantage of..
A stray dog, ​​son of Manfria, was the friendly Billy, coppery brown hair, medium-small size and sociable character. Sometimes we gave him a hand by sitting on the raised floor of the veranda and now using a scissor, now a tweezer to free him from some parasite.

The waves followed each other with varying rhythms on the huge body of water that was gathered from the veranda of the house as if it was a lookout tower.
In the silence of the evening, we could hear clearly the notes of Nikka Costa's On my own, emanating from some beach about a kilometre away.
Meanwhile, the moon was highlighted reflecting  in the huge body of water.
Thousands of white fragments close to each other that the sea cradled according to its mood of the moment.
I woke up in the morning, sometimes before Elio, and from the lookout tower, when I found a particularly calm sea, I went to the room happy and woke him up: "Hey Elio, there is the sea which is like a table !!".
We could spend hours and hours between that delicate sand and that warm sea. With its typically shallow sandy bottom, it welcomed children without being almost ever a danger.
Above in a field where I had already been, the plants that suddenly appeared to me with their cotton balls between leaves and yellow stems due to the heat, to be able to represent an explosion of beauty capable of 'marking' anyone.
Certainly the slight movement of the sea on the shoreline, the white figs and the black figs arranged on the right and left of the ladder that sank into the ground ...
Certainly the lightness of those years and that whole island, albeit characterized by significant anomalies but still temperate in climate
Of course the landscapes and history ...
Sicily is capable of 'making its mark'.