the border was very narrow and always empty. The grass that happily reached out to the sun in the spring turned green after a while and turned into puffy bunches. Its roots, aduzheyshy and a little deeper into the ground, were cut off by plows on one side and on the other. The ground fell apart so much that the border became thinner and thinner, and in some places it was interrupted: the soil washed out by rain leveled its edge. This border separated two neighboring fields, two farms, and two families. It was the dividing line of two worlds. She was the boundary of discord between these worlds.

There were quarrels mainly in early spring and late autumn, when the fields were being plowed. Each owner believed that his neighbor was illegally cutting off land from the common border, and the border was allegedly moving to his field because of this. Housewives, grandparents, and even older children took the side of their parents.

But there were younger children in these seven: a girl in one, and a boy in the other. Friendly relations between them began by chance. The boy climbed into the neighboring garden for strawberries, and the girl saw it, but she did not tell her mother. In gratitude, the boy presented her with a box of colored pencils and several pieces of multicolored plasticine.

It was impossible for them to openly play together, and their parents would have forbidden it. It was even more interesting for them to meet in secret. A year later, they went to school. And behind the school there was a small garden planted with cherry trees. There were many small young cherry shoots among the mature trees.

We are unlikely to find out who came up with this idea. But one day the children dug up five or six young cherry trees and secretly planted them on the border in autumn. No one noticed the thin rods of vishanak. Surprisingly, all the seedlings started in the spring. But what happened next?

Each child told her parents that she had planted the seedlings, and immediately asked them not to tell the neighbors about it, so that they would not break the cherries and cover their roots with a plow. So the parents, for their part, thought that their child had planted young trees on the border, and they began to retreat a little when they plowed the land, expanding the border. And after three or four years, the border widened so much that the grass grew freely on it, and the yellow heads of tansy swayed in the wind. And the cherries spread their crowns and together raised their branches, strewn with white flowers, to the sun.

The quarrels somehow subsided by themselves, the adults even began to greet each other in the morning, and the children ran together to the House of Culture, to the cinema and to dance.

time is running out without looking back. The boy and the girl graduated from high school. He was drafted into the army, and she was on her way to study in a big city. When I was a boy, I first received letters from my son from far away Asia, and then from Afghanistan.

...The funeral came the following autumn. The soldier was buried all over the neighborhood. There was also a girl at the funeral who came from the city. And in the spring, she traveled very, very far on a Komsomol trip.

A year later, the stranger who appeared in the village, a beautiful, slender woman, was barely recognized by the villagers as the sweet child who wept bitterly at the funeral of a young soldier. Friends and classmates once traveled around the world, there were no longer living parents on either side, and only behind the threshing floor, in the middle of a field overgrown with grass, a line dotted with yellow grass burned in the sun, over which line, touching branches like hands, healthy and strong grew under the high sun cherries.