Mamaia's Stove

I recently found online a lovely photograph which brought back so many memories of my grandmother Elena. I called my maternal grandmother, mamaia, which derives from ‘mama,’ mom.

Dressed in a folk costume, an elderly lady is cooking in her dark kitchen adorned with a white stove made of mud and manure bricks. The cooking top was made of cast iron with different size openings (eyes) to accommodate various size pots. The openings had three concentric circles which could be removed one at a time with a ‘cleste’ (tongs) to fit small and large pots. The fire burned wood if the wood reserves lasted for the winter.

Mamaia bent over the stove for most of her nine decades of life. As the eldest child, her parents would have given her the task of bringing wood into the house and start the fire in the morning before all her other siblings woke up. Nothing about country life was easy. Women, men, and children toiled all day until it was too dark, and everybody had been fed, including the animals in the yard, the pig, the chicken, the geese, the rabbits, the horse, the cow, and the ducks. They all served a purpose to keep the family growing and thriving.

The second floor of the barn, accessed by a ladder, was used to store grain, wheat, and corn; an army of cats kept the mouse and rat population to a manageable size. I can still hear the mice colony running through the walls at night. No matter how many cats infested with fleas grandma amassed in the yard, they could not keep up with the fast-multiplying rodents who ate the corn and the wheat stored for winter.

Occasionally, I would get to ride with grandpa in a horse-drawn cart to the grist mill at the edge of the village. He would turn wheat and corn into flour and cornmeal. I could only hope that the grain had been separated from the mice droppings before it was ground into cornmeal and flour. Mamaia’s many cats could barely keep up eating and killing the mice colony resident in the barn loft and the walls.

As for me, it was a treat to ride on soft hay to the mill. It was not a smooth ride on the unpaved road filled with potholes created by heavy wagons. But then the twice a day bus running to the city six miles away was no smooth ride either. The rickety bus was full of Diesel engine pollution fumes and had holes in the floor sometimes, a fascinating way to watch the road underneath run over the cloddy roads.

Mamaia’s yard was seldom clear of mud and barnyard animals’ poop. We did not care much after a while. We ran barefoot and the mud and bird poop squished between our toes. It drove Mamaia nuts because many of the kids running around eventually developed worms from the contaminated bird droppings. Many died without treatment, and I lost quite a few friends except Stella. Mom brought us disgusting medicine from the city to treat the infestation.

Life was hard in the village and people worked from sun rise until sundown just to survive, providing food for their families, and to contribute their required “fair” share to the communist co-operative farm. There was, of course, no such thing as “fair” when it came to the Communist Party. Their leaders required sometimes the impossible and a pound of flesh from their subjects.

Mamaia had to sew to supplement the meager income and provisions and Tataia (maternal grandpa) repaired bicycles, tractors, flat tires, wagons, and anything villagers brought him to fix.

Water pump I photographed in 2015; it belonged to my aunt and

was almost as old as my Mamaia's

I wished I had a camera when I was a child; I would have captured Tataia in his shop, a large bench with tools, and an awning leaning from the mud brick house. I would have photographed Mamaia hand-washing clothes in a small wooden tub carved out of a large tree trunk, after getting iced water from the pump in the yard. She had to pour first a pot of hot water in order to melt the ice clogging the cast iron pipe above ground.

I do have a picture of her from 1985 with my daughter Mimi, who is almost 5 years old, pumping water for her. I posted this picture on my first book, Echoes of Communism. The pump is still there, a decorative relic, no longer connected to the underground well.

Mamaia’s iron cast top stove cooked many delicious meals in wintertime and warmed the tiny adjacent bedroom where I used to sleep; an air duct from the mud brick stove guided the hot air into the room.

Mamaia’s mud brick house has been demolished after she passed away at the age of 90. Her grandson Sorin, who inherited the property, built a modern home thanks to his earnings in Italy. Mamaia would have been happy and proud.