Ploiesti buried under snow in 2017 Photo: Florentina A. |
I was
planning to go to an Epiphany celebration that morning and was not sure if I
could drive on unplowed roads in our neighborhood. The main highways were clear;
this time nothing was left to chance, plows and salt trucks were in position
the night before. They were not going to repeat last year’s fiasco when a few
inches of snow on untreated roads caused gridlock on all major highways and
interstates for hours in northern Virginia. I was stuck on a hill top with many
others for six hours before we were rescued.
I made it to
my friend’s beautiful mansion, perched on the top of a hill and I parked on an
incline without fear. The snow had stopped, how hard would it be to maneuver
the car going home?
An hour and
a half later, I did not like what I saw. The snow was coming down hard again, covering
everything with a fresh, thick blanket.
As I looked out the window in the back yard at Denise’s two pink
flamingos covered in inches of snow, my mind wondered to my childhood’s snow, a
world away on the other side of the globe, in another time, another life, not
so abundant as today.
Our winters
were always very heavy, icy, and bitter cold. When it snowed, we stayed snowed
in for months in the country unless God was merciful and temperatures rose for
a few days. Then it snowed again on top of ice.
The city plowed the main roads for buses and trams, but side streets
were always buried deeply. The main streets had snow piled up so high on the sides;
we could not see the heads of the people walking between the mountains of snow.
Boulevards and avenues were covered in dirty slush, splashed with vengeance onto
everything.
I am not
sure how much the many falls on sheer ice have affected the intense pain I have
today, I just remember the constant bruises on my legs and butt. I was fortunate
to have never broken a bone, but many of my friends were not so lucky.
To us kids,
winter was a time of fun, sledding, building snow men, snow ball fights, and
ice skating, but for adults it was a time of misery - walking, commuting, and
working in bitter cold. For the elites, who had chauffeurs and their own cars,
it was a time of skiing and partying in the beautiful mountainous lodges and
expensive hotels of beautiful Sinaia resort.
Growing up
with my grandparents in the country, snow was something entirely different than
in the city. It created a lot of extra chores in order to survive. Nobody came
to plow the roads and the bus arrived often only once a day if it did not get
stuck on the way. Once in the village, even though it was only six miles away
from the city, you were stuck for the winter.
We had to
care for animals every day, feed them, water them, and make sure they did not
freeze to death. My grandparents’ four bedroom house did not have heat, nor a
bathroom, so they built a tiny adobe, mud and straw brick, three-room structure
nearby and that is where we survived in winter.
The first
room was where we cooked the meals on the cast iron stove which was fed with
chopped wood and sent heat to the adjoining room where Grandma Elena and I
slept. Grandpa Cristache’s bed was not far from the stove and as such, he got
up every morning and restarted the fire which had died during the night. We did
not freeze because we had really thick and heavy wool quilted comforters
stuffed with cotton which kept us toasty warm. As soon as we stepped out of
bed, it was very cold.
A third room
had a separate entrance and was used as a summer kitchen and that is where we
ate our meals as well. It was warmed by a butane gas stove on which grandma
cooked our meals and the slop for the pig.
The wooden
outhouse was located in the garden, as far away from the house as possible, and
we had to trek through mud and snow to use it. It was just a wood shack over a
hole in the ground. The toilet paper was pages from the main communist
newspaper, Scinteia (the spark),
with Ceausescu’s brain-numbing lying speeches. It gave adults a sort of perverse
and guilty pleasure to use his printed face on our behinds.
Grandma felt
sorry for me, a “city girl,” where we had indoor plumbing and a bathroom. But I
spent more time with them growing up and on school vacations than in the city.
Besides, the commies did not give us hot water often in winter and in summer they
even cut off cold water in order to clean and maintain their holding containers
of rust and minerals or to conserve resources. So Grandma brought in a bucket
at night so I did not have to go to the outhouse to pee; she did not want me to
trip in the dark and fall on ice or snow.
At night,
she gave me a clean and warm flannel pajama, painfully washed by her ageing
hands and dried on the line, clean but smelling like wet dog. We slept cozy warm
until the fire in the stove died out and the crackling of burning wood stopped.
As soon as we hit the sack, flees woke up and started biting but we were too
tired and cold to care. Grandma always fed many flee-infested cats that slept
in the attic, in hope that they would control the mouse population. We could
hear the mice at night running through the tunnels they dug inside the adobe
walls, probably going up to where hay and grain was stored. When we got up in
the morning, bleary eyed and shivering, we waited for Grandpa to stoke the fire
again before we crawled out of bed. Our pajamas and nightgowns bore bloody
witnesses to the many flea bites we got during the night. Grandma tried to treat
the cats with a flea powder, probably DDT, but fleas became hardy, they always
came back.
Every
morning we had to boil water to start the frozen pump outside which gave us
water. It would freeze so hard, we had to boil a couple of pots before we could
break the ice and start pumping water again for our own use and for the
animals.
I remember
thinking that I never wanted to be a farm girl, to live in the country, because
life was too harsh, frigid, and miserable. And there were so many chores that a
child like me could not understand. Life
was hard, no radio, no TV, and no electricity, we used a kerosene lamp with a wick
and a fluted clear glass globe.
I can never
understand to this day how my Grandfather bicycled to work nine kilometers each
way in heavy snow for four decades. He was in good health but, when he
developed a hernia and needed an operation, they nicked his colon during
surgery. Ceausescu’s communist surgeons were ill prepared to care for the
proletariat and nobody was concerned when most of them either died on the
operating table or later from infection from a botched procedure. When I was
seventeen, my beloved Grandpa, who taught me so much history, told me so many
stories, and guided my first seven formative years of my life, died a horrible death
from gangrene.
Village kids
seldom had time to have fun in the snow – there were too many chores. But once
in a while, around the holidays, they went from door to door, pulling a sleigh
in the snow, decorated with a pine tree with colorful crepe paper garlands, singing
about Father Frost and wishing the residents health and happiness in the New Year.
The snow
turned red at Christmas with the blood of slaughtered pigs, a generational tradition
passed for centuries. We were not allowed to eat meat unless we watched the
animal being killed. I always hated that because domesticated animals were my pets.
As I watered and fed them, I talked to them as if they were human and petted
them. They responded in kind with affection, following me around the yard.
And here I
am today, in this beautiful home, surrounded by freshly fallen powdery snow, so
far away from where I came, wishing once more that I could travel back in time
to my childhood snow, my grandparents, and my roots.
Florentina's Yard 2017 |
I regretfully
left, struggling to control the car in the driving snow, and, when I got home,
my cousin had sent some photos of the snow they got in my hometown of Ploiesti.
It was just as I had remembered it. I gazed through teary eyes at the image of
roads and fenced yards totally submerged by un-shoveled tall and pristine snow
and I wished that I was an oblivious and blissful child again.
Note: A video of the 1966 winter in Bucharest.
https://www.facebook.com/BucurestiulSecret/videos/935231383279607/
Note: A video of the 1966 winter in Bucharest.
https://www.facebook.com/BucurestiulSecret/videos/935231383279607/
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