The Heavy Rains of My Childhood

I spent my early years before first grade with my maternal grandparents. My grandpa had golden hands, he could fix anything and was the best mechanic in the village. His outdoor shop with an awning between the summer clay brick hut and the nice brick home contained any tool imaginable that a Mr. Fix-It would need. He repaired engines, tractors, bicycles, and any motorized thing that the villagers brought to him for a small fee or a barter. He loved history and sometimes accompanied the archeologists who had rented his home for the summer while they were digging for Roman treasure at the edge of the village where the ruins of an old church were dug up by a farmer who was trying to plow his field.

Grandma was the best homemaker, having raised six children; she kept them fed and alive in circumstances that were often quite difficult. She raised a garden every year, one pig, chicken, ducks, and a milk cow. Grandpa Cristache raised rabbits. I was not too fond of eating rabbit stew; they were my pets who hopped around the yard, sending the chicken scurrying for shelter.

We had a torrential rain last night and it reminded me of the rains I used to love in the country at my grandparents' farm. Their yard was always a mess of bird poop when it was dry and a soggy mess when it rained. Grandma and I loved the rain for entirely different reasons. We sought shelter under the awning of the concrete patio of the summer clay brick home; Grandma Elena would busy herself with some chore while seated, resting her weary and tired body, and I watched mesmerized the rain pouring small creeks down the muddy yard. I could not wait to jump in the puddles! We made mud poppers, the closest we would ever come to having the bursting sound of firecrackers.

The rain was always peaceful, no furious thunder or lightning, just endless tapping rain on the tin roof, tap, tap, tap. It made grandma happy because she did not have to water her garden by opening the ditches running in front of the house to divert water into her patches of lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, corn, and cabbage. She did not have to sink her feet and half her legs into the muddy ditches to break the dams with a hoe to make the water flow. The skies provided steady, soaking water; she was free of all the demanding work she otherwise would have had to do to irrigate her garden that would feed us and the animals throughout the year from the jars of carefully canned vegetables stored in the root cellar.

I used to go down from time to time with my best friend Steluta, to cool off on the hottest days of summer. It always smelled like fresh dirt and onions, no matter what grandma stored there. There were rows of jars filled with tomato sauce, pickled beets, large jars of pickled red bell peppers, cauliflower, hot red and green peppers, cabbage, and fruit preserves like strawberries and plums, from her abundant harvest.

She preserved the best small plum-shaped green tomatoes with walnut pieces stuffed inside. It was a delicious treat for special guests, served on little crystal plates with a glass of cold water from the fountain in the yard. Rows of apples were lined up in the damp air. I do not know how they survived until winter, but they were still edible, albeit wrinkled.

White jars of lard with pieces of rendered pork added light to an otherwise dank and semi-dark root cellar. Grandpa never installed any kind of light there because, for the longest time, nobody had electricity in the village until the early 1970s. And the village was only 9 km from the largest city of 600,000 inhabitants, 2 km from the largest refinery, and was connected by gravel roads to a main, paved highway. We carried a match box and lit a candle from the shelf.

The worst part of living with my grandparents was the sleeping quarters in the small house made of clay bricks with two tiny bedrooms, one for me and one for my grandparents. The rooms were clean, but we were eaten alive at night by fleas from grandma’s army of cats she fed to control the mouse population attracted by her upstairs barn in which she stored wheat and corn. Mom would come from time to time and dust all the cats with flea powder and that helped for a short while, but they returned with a vengeance. And the cats could not kill all the mice that had taken up residence inside the walls and in the upstairs barn. At night, we could hear the four-legged menace trotting inside the walls.

I was always sad when, every Sunday, after a brief visit, mom would leave to go back to the city, with the empty promise, which I always believed, that she would come back and take me with her. I was sad because it never happened. She did not have day care nor babysitters while she and dad went to work. The living conditions were much cleaner with my parents, but I was not old enough to be left alone in the tiny apartment.

Grandma left me alone to roam with my village friends. She only worried if I did not come back by suppertime. On rainy days, I would be my grandpa’s shadow, asking constant questions. Grandpa, although annoyed occasionally, loved me because I was, at that time, his only grandchild. My insatiable curiosity knew no bounds. When I got tired, I sat quietly in a rickety chair and watched the drumming rainfall turn every plant into a beautiful, lush green and the ground into a muddy brown smelling like earthworms.