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.
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.
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