The Bench and the Sweet Wrapper

Every day after school, Alina sat on her favourite bench in the park and ate something tasty.

The bench stood under a big old chestnut tree. In summer it gave thick shade, and in autumn it dropped shiny brown conkers right at Alina's feet. Pigeons strutted nearby, and sometimes a red squirrel ran down the trunk and looked at Alina with round eyes, as if waiting for a nut.

One day Alina was eating a sweet, and the wrapper slipped out of her fingers. It fell under the bench and rustled in the wind. Alina looked at it and thought, "One little wrapper, no big deal."

But the next day two more lay beside it. Somebody else must have thought the same thing. And within a week there was a whole heap of papers, wrappers and empty juice boxes under the bench. The wind chased them along the path, the pigeons pecked at the shiny wrappers, and the squirrel didn't come any more.

It was no fun to sit there now. Alina sighed and even tried another bench, but it felt wrong, and the sun shone right in her eyes.

"But that's my bench," she told herself. "And the mess started with my wrapper."

The next day Alina brought a big bag and her mum's gardening gloves from home. She picked up everything, down to the very last scrap: wrappers, bottle caps, even ice-cream sticks. It didn't take long at all, and soon the ground under the bench was clean again.

While she was working, a little boy on a scooter stopped beside her.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Bringing the squirrel back," Alina answered.

The boy thought about it, climbed off his scooter and picked up two papers, and then one more. He carried them very seriously to the bin and rolled away, looking very proud.

Then Alina came up with a simple rule and wrote it on a piece of paper in big letters. "What you bring to the park, you take home."

She told her friends about the rule. At first they were surprised, and then they liked it. Now, when the girls sat on the bench, they put their wrappers in their pockets or in a little pouch Alina carried in her backpack. And one day her friends brought a bag of their own and cleaned up around the next bench too.

Soon her bench was the cleanest in the park. The first time the squirrel came back, it sat on the very end of the bench holding a conker in its paws and looked at Alina, as if it were saying hello. Alina held her breath so as not to scare it away. And the pigeons strutted proudly along the clean path.

One day an old woman with a walking stick sat down next to Alina. She looked around, breathed in the fresh air and said, "How nice it is here."

Alina just smiled. She didn't tell her how many papers used to lie there. It simply felt good.

That evening Alina walked home past the clean paths. The street lamps came on one after another, and the chestnut leaves whispered overhead. She thought about how good it feels when a place is better after you than it was before.

At home Alina got into bed. She dreamed of her bench under the chestnut tree, the red squirrel, and the quiet park, where the wind had nothing to chase but autumn leaves.

Goodnight.