Childhood Freedom Under a Blue Sky and White Puffy Clouds

I remember as a child watching the fluffy clouds from my bed of green grass in grandma’s garden; a small patch of rich grass was off limits to animals to graze, given its proximity to the fenced garden. It smelled fresh and intoxicating even though grandma always treated her nearby potatoes with DDT to kill off the dreaded Colorado beetle which otherwise would have devoured her garden.

The clouds’ movement across the blue sky was a pretend way for me to fly with the birds, to catch a ride on the tail of a white cloud and fly to the city, away from the country where my mom had dropped me off for what it seemed, to a small child, like an eternity. I only saw my mom for a few hours on Sundays and each time she left, I felt abandoned, like she would never come back.

My parents were honest and poor, paid a meager salary, were not Communist Party members, and could not afford the communist day care rates, nor kindergarten. The concept of hired baby-sitting did not exist in our culture.

Nobody took their children on trips or to restaurants (that was a luxury only the communist elites could afford), they were left behind with grandparents or other available relatives who were not exactly the most dependable caretakers. It thrilled kids that nobody really cared that they were gone to explore all day and get into trouble. But the village in general watched for other people’s kids and their wellbeing.

So, my grandparents became my babysitters for the first seven years of my life. I loved them and I followed them around religiously, pestering them with incessant questions. They humored me, grandma, a bit less because I was the only grandchild at the time.

I always found what grandpa was doing infinitely more fascinating than my grandmother’s cooking, tending to the small garden that fed us, caring for the birds and animals in the yard, and doing laundry.

Grandpa’s shop, his tools that could repair anything the villagers brought in weekly in rusty heaps, his archeology magazines with glossy pictures from far away (old issues of National Geographic), his readings and on site explorations with his tenants who were doing archeological digs at the edge of the village where they had found under an old church ruins a couple of Roman tombs, were fascinating me.

I loved his old coins from WWI and prior and the few Roman coins I found in a battered metal box in his closet. I played with them often even though grandpa had warned me to leave that box alone. It was just so tempting once he told me to stay away from that historical treasure. The fact that they looked so old fascinated me.

But I wanted most of all to be in the city with my parents. The 9 km distance to my parents’ tiny apartment seemed to the mind of a child a circle around the globe. The rickety bus from the city came to the village twice a day, dislodging dirty and exhausted men who had jobs in the many refineries and factories in the polluted city of Ploiesti with its Dâmbu River. The unpleasant smell of petroleum from the floating oil patches was overwhelming. Nothing could have lived in that water, and we did not dare to go in. Today I hope that they have cleaned this 24-mile-long tributary which flows through the town of Ploiesti.

But the village had artesian water and the creeks and Prahova River were crystal clear. The fish swam around us in the water holes we found to cool off in from the summer’s baking heat. We did not have air conditioners and humidity was low.

Prahova River

As children, we walked quite a bit of distance from aunt Nuta’s house to reach the Prahova river with cold and refreshing water. Aunt Nuta was supposed to be our protector and babysitter. She was fourteen years older than the oldest child in the group. None of us could swim and we could have easily drowned in the chilly water, but the current was slow, and the water volume was low in the summer. We did not have fishing gear, we just bathed with the large silver fishes who swam around us, unafraid of humans.

When it rained hard and the irrigation and road drainage ditches running in front of every house were full of muddy water, we stripped to our white underwear and bathed in that muck to my grandmother’s horror who had to boil our clothes to make them semi-white and clean again. We did not have bleach back then.

There was a creek in the middle of the village that we kids walked or biked to quite often to catch minnows, frogs, and leeches. Grandpa always had ratty bikes around that the villagers brought in to be fixed. I used grandma’s fine stockings with a metal wire to fish them out. She never knew how her finest stockings would disappear, one leg at a time. I put the leeches in an empty glass milk bottle filled with clean water, with a large mouth. The leeches always escaped during the night even though I covered the bottle with a loose lid and a small rock on top. I am not so sure if grandma did not release them from their captivity when we were not looking.

On my last trip to the village in 2015, I noticed that the creek was gone, they had rerouted it elsewhere when they paved the roads in the 1990s. Distances seemed much shorter than I remembered them as a child when walking seemed interminable in every direction. The village now had a water fountain in the middle where the bus stopped, and a mercantile and communist-style cinema used to be. They were all gone, replaced by a grocery store.