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.

 

 

Phone Conversation with Maria*

A few days ago, I talked to my childhood friend about our shared fifteen years in the same communist apartment block built in a hurry in the 1960s by the communist party regime. The activists were eager to move into that drab concrete and steel building as many villagers and urbanites as possible, farmers whose property they stole and whose homes they demolished, and poor proletarians who had no home of their own as everything of value they had ever owned had been confiscated by the Communist Party for the “good of the people.”

We reminisced about our fifteen years in the same government schools but different classrooms, and what our parents tried to do to help us survive and even in some cases, make our existence better. Her life was much nicer, we did not understand why at the time, but we gathered around her mother’s tiny kitchen as often as she would allow us.

Maria* told me that her dad used to be the communist apparatchik in the factory where he worked. As payment, for reporting on what other workers said during casual conversations at work, and for his efforts to indoctrinate others during daily discussions and weekly mandatory “syndicate” meetings, he received a monthly monetary stipend and rations of food from special stores dedicated to the loyal communist party members and activists.

Not all workers were permitted to be members of the communist club, they had to earn that distinction. And having an unacceptable background that was considered “bourgeois” was not exactly a ringing endorsement for membership in the rarified club of Bolsheviks. It did not take much to be considered “bourgeois,” a larger plot of land, or a nicer home inherited from parents and grandparents who worked hard to build it.

Bolsheviks welcomed snitches and convincing activists like her father who sported grey hair at an early age, making him look more distinguished, like a wise sage who could be trusted. When he died of old age, Maria threw away all his rubbish books he had in his communist activist library.

Maria had a rare rotary dial telephone in her home, something we only dared to dream. Most apartments had to wait 14 years to have a phone installed and bugged. Maria had better and abundant food, nicer clothes, medicine and proper medical care, finer furniture, and a black and white TV long before our parents were able to afford one.

Today, 33 years since the “fall” of communism in Romania, we were able to talk openly about our lives from long ago and laugh about it. That is not something we could have done during the oppressive socialist republic regime.

Another friend who lived on the same fifth floor as my parents did, right across from our apartment door, had a better life than ours as well, thanks to their father, a trucker, who lifted items regularly from whatever shipment he was hauling that day, and brought them home to feed his family. When he had an excess of whatever was in his cargo, he bartered with others. Decades later, his son, with a sweet but toothless grin, was still living in the same apartment with his family and elderly mom.

As kids, we did not understand the implications of why those two families’ lives were better. We just saw more food and we were hungrily envious. Nobody brought food to our door but, as we played games or did our homework in her apartment, sometimes we would get morsels of whatever desserts the lady of the house prepared for her family. The wonderful smells would waft up the concrete block’s stairwell and people knew who was cooking tasty food that day.

My daddy, an honest man to a fault, despised these people who stole to survive. Daddy knew bartering with stolen food was against the law and punishable by long jail sentences, but these people were desperate to keep their families alive any way they could in the absence of welfare. One neighbor went to jail for several years for simple theft at his factory. Daddy always said that he would rather we starve than steal from the oppressive regime that kept us so thin and dependent on their food rejects and bones scraped off meat that the inept communist party economic planners brought to the market daily.

My mom always shook her head in disapproval at how much food Americans squandered each day, not realizing how close to food shortages they are. In the end, the abundant system in this country failed her just as miserably as the communist system in Romania had failed her decades ago. Mom’s favorite phrase for everything not run properly was, “this is a village without dogs.”

 

*This is not her real name

Brimming with Christmas Spirit

Wikipedia photo

I recently met a young couple giddy with the jubilant spirit of Christmas. It was a rare encounter as Christmas traditions are under assault and condemned on the altar of progressivism and Islam. He wore a red and green elf vest and a Santa hat over his regular clothes and a big smile of good cheer. His lovely wife had donned a beautiful red dress with sparkling tinsel on the left collar. He told me how much he enjoyed Christmas and decorating trees which he left up every year late into January, even past the Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 6.

We started talking and I told them about our Christmas celebration and our fir tree, thin and puny on branches and ornaments, but high on spirits. They listened politely but then I realized from the expression on their faces and the look in their eyes that neither one could relate to the description that followed.  They were millennial young and recently married.

I told them how we decorated the blue spruce with real candles, apples, cookies, and home-made shiny paper ornaments, with a few and rare Bohemian glass ornaments, and how we lit the tiny candles every night for a few minutes - they were clipped as far to the outside branches as possible to avoid catching the tree on fire. To mom’s exasperation, Daddy would nail the base of the tree stand to the parquet floor. A few oranges, apples, and cookies were hung on each branch with colorful string, and chocolate bonbons and plump raisins filled home-made cardboard tiny baskets decorated with red and green crepe paper.

Larger cities decorated a huge tree in the center of town with colorful lightbulbs and organized a winter carnival with rides on St. Nicholas Day, December 6. New Year’s Day was a secular holiday decreed so by the Communist party but Christmas was not really a holiday at all.

People who lived in villages stuck to tradition and celebrated Christmas. Priests opened the modest and very cold churches for services on Christmas Eve. I attended services with my aunt Leana who was a deacon and a cantor. Churches in the mountainous areas were more active so far away from the prying eyes of communists.   

Caroling, donations of food to people less fortunate, and having an extended family meal to celebrate Christmas was the highlight of our year.  During certain days, we went from house to house with elaborately prepared plates of food and baskets of goodies for those less fortunate, widowed, old, or sick.

Villagers learned to care for each other in good times and bad.  They bartered services and things they had in excess with other neighbors since money was so tight. People learned to adjust to their communist-imposed poverty in so many creative ways.

My parents, my secret Santa (Mos Craciun), would put a small food item by my pillow which I would find on Christmas morning – an unwrinkled apple, a fragrant orange from Israel, a green banana from Greece, or a bittersweet chocolate bar. Christmas was good for us kids because we were oblivious to our state in life. We had no idea how hard adults struggled to make ends meet.

How could I make this well-off American couple understand that Christmas was a gift of prayer and time to be with the extended family to share love and abundant food that was otherwise missing the rest of the year?

Nobody can comprehend that an entire nation can be held hostage for decades and suffer so much in a fight for survival every day to find food we take for granted here, bread, milk, butter, flour, sugar, rice, cooking oil, and needful things such as toilet paper, vitamins, and basic medicines. It is hard to believe when the shelves in America’s grocery stores are brimming with food.

As Oleg Atbashian said in his book, Hotel USSR, after he legally immigrated to the U.S., he cried when he saw the abundance surrounding him, not tears of happiness, mind you, but of anguish for all the unnecessary and cruel pain the proletariat endured for decades at the hands of communist autocrats who enjoyed making the population suffer for many generations through constant shortages of food, long lines, lack of basic necessities like hot water, heat, having to depend on bribes, black markets, kickbacks, and bartering to survive.

An artist, Atbashian entered an art supplies store in Manhattan and wrote, “Rows upon rows of shelves brimmed with products that catered to every artistic need. No gatekeeper was checking permissions, and no Artists Union card was required to make a purchase… After the first floor, I went to the second, and then to the third. And then I imagined how different my life could have been and broke down in tears.”

Americans are so unappreciative of and spoiled by their abundance created through the hard work of many past generations, that they have no idea how other people live or that life can be any other way but good. But this American knows better and my Christmas spirit will always grow inside our Christian home and in my heart.

 

Childhood Years with Mamaia and Tataia

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

The simplest things in life can trigger a wave of memories long forgotten or buried deeply in the recesses of my mind – the scent of food, fresh baked bread, an exotic perfume, a melody, the crisp snowy air, the smell of smoke in autumn and a sudden thunderstorm.

The steady rain for the past two days could have easily turned into feet of snow had the temperature not been above the forties. Hard rain drenched the woods into deeper shades of winter browns and greens and turned the trails into soggy miniature swamps so close to the river. It was a long overdue rain as both summer and winter have been quite dry.

Even in its dormant state, nature smelled alive and dense trees looked majestically strong. Without its coat of leaves, the woods allowed the river to peek and shine through its thick boughs. In the full moonlight, each tree appeared like a phantasmagorical giant with human features, casting long shadows in the drenched soil.

As a child, I’ve loved rain and its soothing thumping on the metal roof. Sheltered under Tataia’s shop awning, I was mesmerized by the rivers of fast water running in the muddy yard; everything in nature came alive. Tataia would answer any questions about the earth bursting with life, how clouds formed, why it rained, and how water nourished life.

I learned how to garden, how to water plants with carefully dug ditches that pulled the rain water away from direct contact with the fragile roots. He taught me first how to grow wheat and bean sprouts in a moist glass dish on the window sill in winter. He was truly my first biology and science teacher.

Lightning did not frighten me; the zig-zags of light were God’s hand drawing on the sky’s canvas. Rainbows were God’s palette, the colors that tinted nature and life. And thunder was God snapping his whip to make unseen heavenly horses run faster through the clouds.

When it rained, Mamaia had a reprieve from the farm chores. But she did not rest; she washed clothes by hand in a wooden tub carved from a tree. It was the same tub she used to bathe me in as a toddler. Her hands would turn red from scrubbing one item at a time in hot water and harsh, unpleasant smelling soap which was made with lye. And there was no lotion to soothe the redness of her small hands. Layers of skin would peel off painfully. Finding unscented lanolin to treat the cracked and burning skin was difficult.

On my wash day, the modern “chore” is to sort the laundry, pour a pre-measured cup of detergent into the washing machine, adjust the water setting and temperature, and let it do the scrubbing and washing for me. And the dryer replaces hours of hanging clothes on the line, bringing in off the line dry clothes stiff as a board in winter and smelling like wet dog. We never stop to think how much easier our lives are today and how many varieties of cheap lotions we have to soften our hands. I don’t think most people appreciate what a wonderful and easy existence they live.

Mamaia’s hands were magical. They raised six children, fed them, bathed them, and cloth-diapered them. Mamaia cooked and washed everything for six children, milked the cows, slopped the pig, and fed numerous chicken, ducks, and rabbits that Tataia bought from other farmers.

In her spare time, Mamaia was the village seamstress who made beautiful wedding dresses, church dresses, and practical every day clothes for her own children. She mended their clothes and pressed them with a heavy iron which could be filled with hot coals or placed on the stove to get hot. Sometimes there were slight brown lines left from the iron burning a favorite shirt but children still wore it.

Mamaia’s chores included putting away the vegetables from the garden that Tataia planted, weeded, and watered. She would stir a huge cast iron pot outside on a fire stoked with wood, turning pounds of tomatoes into a sauce preserved in jars for winter time. She pickled cucumbers, cauliflower, green peppers, red peppers, green tomatoes and preserved green beans in jars sealed with wax or corks covered in tar. Everything was stored in the cellar for winter.

Her prune marmalade and tart cherry preserves were delicious. Using sugar made from beets, she made sweet preserves from green plum tomatoes stuffed with walnuts. Regrettably, her recipes were never recorded before she passed away. We were too busy trying to survive or escape the communist harsh life to think about writing these recipes down for posterity.

To this day, when I want to cook something that my mom used to cook for us, it is impossible to replicate the recipe because she did everything from memory, just like Mamaia, a pinch of this, a pinch of that, no measuring cups in mom’s kitchen. Now that her memory is scrambled, I regret not having written her ingredients down and the number of pinches.

My mom smiles in her moments of clarity and tells me how hard she and her five siblings had to work to help their parents on the farm, how they had to give up too much education, and how they practically raised each other. Aunt Nicuta was Mamaia’s first child; Nicuta helped raise her brother, and then each child helped raise the next. They learned to grow up fast this way. Few of the girls actually extended their education past eighth grade or high school but the two boys went much further.

Rain is still coming down hard, drumming on the shingles; my eyes are taking in the soaked nature and bubbling mud but my mind is still wandering through my childhood years, flashing memories and images of my past, times when we, as children didn’t understand the vicissitudes of life, we were happy and felt loved no matter how poor our families were. It was another life, another world, long time ago.

 

Through the Fog of Time

The creek of our childhood Photo: Ileana 2015

As we age, humans tend to mellow out and nothing that had previously been that important matters anymore in the grand scheme of things. All struggles, frustrations, successes, victories, defeats, losses, and gains, dissipate in the fog of time. Regrets and memories of opportunities lost, of physical pain, of mental anguish and frustration diminish, replaced by arthritis, loneliness, and loss of loved ones. The struggle is still there for billions of others, very real and painful, but it seems almost irrelevant to us.

Romanians just lost their King Michael to old age, very old age, and their last hope that a monarchy might somehow right all the wrongs that had plagued the country politically was dashed and died with him. There won’t be another king. Some mourned him, most did not even know he existed nor cared. Like here, these citizens are part of the #resist movement yet they have no idea what they are resisting.

Yesterday I met one of my first cousins I adore (I have 27) and his lovely daughter Elena for lunch in a town nearby in Virginia. It was surreal. If you had told me 39 years ago that someday in the future, in a state far away, thousands of miles away from my former home in Romania, I would see one of my first cousins again, I would have been extremely incredulous and would have laughed, a physical impossibility.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

Yet here we were, reminiscing about our childhood, how fast time flew, how my aunt passed away a week after a severe cough had plagued her for months, and the second stroke that killed my uncle while gardening. We compressed almost four decades of life, weddings, baptisms, burials, disputes, schools, professions, and family into two hours, surrounded by spouses, children, and grandchildren. Good food and beloved company are always relaxing.

He asked me about retirement, teaching, accomplishments, life in America, and it almost seemed like we were talking about someone else. What teaching accomplishments? It was just a job that paid me well. No teacher of the year for me and certainly no thanks for a job well done. I was not a Democrat, nor a communist, how could I possibly succeed in education and thrive? Mediocrity and collectivist politics ruled around me in academia. My cousin was shocked.

I told him about all the communists in education in America and he was almost incredulous. How could any rational human being possibly think that a Marxist ideology that killed 100 million people around the world can even remotely be considered in this beautiful country built on free markets, not oppression and tyranny?

My cousin had to work in difficult places around the world in order to bring home enough cash to build a beautiful villa for his family. Two of his three beautiful daughters moved to America, just like I did, in order to find freedom and opportunity for success that had been denied to many still in Romania, twenty-eight years after the “fall” of communism. They joined the five million other Romanians who immigrated around the globe in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

We talked about adjustment and assimilation, learning the language, becoming an American citizen and losing my Romanian citizenship, how it was so much harder for an older person to learn a new language and how little my mom learned in 37 years. Cousin Ionel learned Russian in school and found it much easier to learn and speak than the English language, even with the Cyrillic alphabet. Russian is very phonetic, it is pronounced the same way it is written, no wild variations as in the English language, he added.

We reminisced about fishing and swimming in the crystal clear river in his village, a river now so shallow that it looks more like a creek. The landscape was more verdant as more trees grew around it, seeded by the blowing wind. A nicely paved rural road now runs nearby, no more gravel roads, picking up dust every time the bus drove through.

Now every home has a nice car, food on the table, no lines, and a well-stocked country store, owned by his brother. The store stocks fresh meat and vegetables, frozen food, fresh bread, wine, sugar, cooking oil, flour, and anything a cook might need. There is even a gas pump on the side of the road. No gas station around it, just the pump. Bringing free markets to Romania changed the pastoral and isolated life for so many.

We talked about growing up. Cousin Ionel had three brothers and one sister. At meal time there was never enough to eat, it was a free-for-all. My aunt placed a large bowl of food in the middle of the table and the meal began after a very brief mandatory prayer, no portion sizes, whoever ate the fastest, got more to eat first. Poor Gigi, the runt of the family, was always left behind and hungrier than the rest. Even so, there was still not enough to nourish five growing children, we were still hungry and thin when we finished a meal, he said. I used to watch them eat so fast, wondering why my aunt did not give them each equal portions. As an only child, I only had to share food with my mom and dad. We were always hungry ourselves but I did not have to fight siblings at mealtime.

I looked at our table laden with food which we did not prepare but we could afford to pay someone else to prepare for us. Ionel and I never saw restaurant food when we were children and young adults. If it did not come from mom’s or grandma’s kitchen, we went hungry. Later in life, as we gained freedom of movement and our financial fortunes improved, we were able to taste our first restaurant meals and foods we’ve never known existed. Ionel is so cosmopolitan when compared to most people that he will eat any food put in front of him. He traveled around the globe through various jobs and sampled many cuisines and so did I.

It was sad to see him go, to say good-bye, almost as surreal as getting on a plane and finding yourself on the other side of the globe in mere hours. We were together for brief and happy moments, found our common roots, reminisced, but then we were lost again in the fog of time. A few photographs were the only proof that we celebrated today the memories from another life, far away from our humble beginnings.

 

The Snow of My Childhood

Ploiesti buried under snow in 2017
Photo: Florentina A. 

The first snow of 2017 finally arrived; a couple of inches covered the ground early before sunrise, turning our world into a powdery-white winter wonderland. The woods were unusually quiet and the animals disappeared with the exception of the resident fox. She ran from the back bushes and left a trail of swirling dry snow disturbed by her bushy tail. My two squirrels were nowhere to be seen.

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/

The Kindergarten Booties

Photo: noastracopilaria@yahoo.com

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose,
And nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free."
- Kris Kristofferson's song

The photograph of a pair of kids’ booties posted on a social website, “Copilaria anilor 80-90,” triggered a flood of memories – it was the exact pair that I used to wear as a child. They were the only ones available for purchase, and required uniform for all children who attended pre-school and kindergarten.

I re-posted the photo thinking that a few of my Romanian friends would comment, but I was wrong. Instead, my much younger cousin from Romania remarked that she had a pair in pre-school in the 1980s. Who knew that commies would stick to the same sorry, cheap, and ugly pair of booties for decades?

One American lady, Gemey, who had traveled to Romania as a missionary in the 1990s, long after communism was temporarily dismantled, wrote, “Having grown up here in the U.S., it’s difficult to imagine no electric, no water, no heat, little food, few clothes. I saw all that, well not the heat, no AC in July was bad enough! But it’s a beautiful country, reminds me of Virginia or Missouri where I live. Green and fertile and full of promise each day. And the people that I met were strong and resourceful and coped with all these situations with grace most of the time. But the moment things got a little better, people were clamoring for more, communist politicians promised more [just like the Bolsheviks] and they voted the commies back into office… sounds like the U.S. doesn’t it?”

She continued, “Superstitions die hard. Even medical doctors believed that evil spirits blew into open windows and people would get sick if they walked barefoot.” They also believed humans got sick if exposed to a slight breeze or draft. Consequently, kids had to wear these felt booties called “sosoni” or “botosei,” crudely made and itchy, in pre-school and kindergarten.

Mom always yelled at me to put on house shoes and she always kept an assortment of slippers in her closet in the U.S. Her granddaughters were amused and loved to irritate her by going barefoot on any kind of surface.

It’s hard to overcome any government dependency, even the communist variety. I have many older relatives who can barely make ends meet today because their pensions from the communist era are so small, yet they are nostalgic for communism. They want to live on the “take-care-of-me plantation,” and “I will do as you say farm.” Why try hard at all when everyone makes the same miserable salary?

The elderly today make an eager voting block that turns out every time to elect the communists back in power – the grey hair commie-voting brigade. They are like jail inmates who spend their entire lives in prison and, when freed, have no idea how to live on the outside, in the free world. They want back in prison where their needs were met poorly but were not expected to do much in return except be on their best behavior, be obedient to strict rules, and be willing to stay behind bars, the very bars that robbed inmates of their freedom in the first place.

I asked my cousin Maria why she voted for communists and she answered, they gave us a small pension, we did not have to work, the rent was low and subsidized, food was hard to find but was also subsidized, cheap alcohol was plentiful, we had rationing coupons, everyone was equally poor and miserable, we did not have to compete, we did not have to try very hard. We just understood that the commies in power were wealthy beyond belief but we accepted that as long as they threw us our daily crumbs and bones. We knew our place and they “protected” us.

What did they protect you from, I asked her. We had a miserable roof over our heads and medical care was free. But Maria, it was free but you could not see doctors nor buy medicines because they were not available, shortages were constant, and you had to fight in lines for the last loaf of bread, toilet paper roll, or bottle of cooking oil, and you had to pay bribes in cash and goods to be seen on time by a better doctor. True, she said, but we had free aspirin and generic Tylenol. She looked down at her feet and remained silent. My arguments did not seem to penetrate her skewed view of reality. No matter what I said, if she had a choice, she would choose communism again and again, graciously resigned and happy with government dependency in exchange for empty promises and scratchy felt booties for her grandchildren.

Having seen the insidious welfare dependency under crony capitalism and under socialism/communism, I seriously doubt that I could change an elderly person’s mentality of addiction to government handouts, even handouts not worth having.
Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014

The Polar Vortex Was Called Winter in My Childhood

It was bitter cold last night. Tiny snowflakes started to fall in the afternoon, turning lawns into a fantastic winter wonderland. Snow began to accumulate like a soft immaculate blanket. Then the hawk came and started blowing the soft dry snow into swirls of wind, howling past the windows, biting and stinging cheeks with the pricking sensation of needles. The wind chill was below 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

The ghostly whiteness cast an illuminating glow inside the house all night. Trees were claiming their stake of the pristine snow-covered ground with intense shadows. The moon was a hanging globe of shiny silvery yellow.

The sunrise made the snow sparkle with an orange glow peppered with crystal rhinestones. It was an invigorating and frost-biting sun.

When my hubby shoveled the drive way, the scraping of the plastic against the asphalt reverberated in the quiet stillness of the street. An occasional stronger gust of wind would temporarily blind him with a snow shower from the tree tops. The tall oaks were creaking with frozen stiffness.

I had left a six inch deep frying pan on the deck last night and it was now covered completely by snow. I could have used a ruler instead but it was more fun this way.

The roads were deserted in spite of the school closures. Nobody went to work except my husband. No kids were outside playing in the snow or sledding down the many hills in the neighborhood. No laughter of kids chasing each other in snowball fights or building snowmen. Homes were shuttered like tombs.

Even the animals were hiding in the woods. There were no deer hoof prints or fox paws in the fresh fallen snow. A silent black bird with white throat was taking a snow bath on the lamp post. The non-hibernating squirrels were hiding in their nests; the ground was way too cold and frozen to dig for nuts between the evergreens.

Are the kids sleeping late or huddled in front of television or computer screens? Are they frightened by the cold, afraid to play outside because they might hurt themselves?

We used to play outside all day in bitter cold winters, oblivious to frigid cold, wetness, and slosh around us or the adult discomfort and misery. Parents had to walk to work, slipping often on the thick ice. We took tumbles like rubber figurines, getting up with a roaring laughter each time, rubbing the painful part.

Bundled up to the eyeballs in layers, with pajamas next to the skin, kids were stuffed like Michelin Men. We skated and sledded until dark, sometimes hitching rides on the tail bumper of slow moving cars. There were no regulators around to tell us that we might die. When the lights came on, we knew it was time to go home. Our clothes were so wet and frozen, it took a little while to peel off all the layers, like a tight onion.

Some dads pulled their children on sleighs on Sundays, trudging through snow and ice like dutiful oxen to make their bundled kids happy. We tobogganed down a steep hill nearby, climbing it with a flexible flyer in tow over and over until our cheeks were rosy and our running noses red from the blustery wind.

On our way to school, sometimes we were secluded from view and wind by snow drifts on both sides – it looked like we were walking through crystal tunnels, occasionally splashed by passing busses. Often the two mile walk back and forth to school was very cold and painful when we slipped on ice or the wind picked up, we were buffeted so hard that the snow felt like little ice daggers cutting our faces with the discomfort of paper cuts – pain by a thousand miniature icicles.

There was a nice ski resort called Sinaia, not far from my hometown – it was “reserved” for foreign vacationers who paid in dollars and the communist elites who had villas in the area and could afford to buy the equipment, pay for lessons, and ride the ski lift to the top. The skating rinks were reserved for the elites as well – ice skates and boots were very expensive.

Our fun winters from long ago are now called polar vortex by the very wise and omniscient climate change discoverers.

I drove to Sinaia last year and visited the lodging base area where more hotels have been built since the temporary “fall” of communism. Now that capitalism in America has given me the opportunity to afford to fly to a ski resort, stay in a ski lodge, buy equipment or rent it, ride the lift to the top, my knees are not so cooperative.

 

 

 

Casey the Teddy Bear

The FedEx guy dropped a large box on the front steps. His truck was at the end of the street before I retrieved it. It was relatively light in spite of its size. I left it by the door so Mimi could find it as soon as she returned.

My daughter opened it with excited anticipation – her hands were quickly tearing into the box. All she knew was that it contained something from her childhood that would make her happy. Inside, wrapped in tissue, was a large teddy bear dressed in green shorts and a farmer’s hat.  

Casey, she squealed in recognition. Casey the Bear was her toy at Grandma’s farm house when she was three years old. She smelled the familiar scent of the farm on the bear that had been stored in the attic for almost thirty years.

Grandpa passed away recently and Dad had been sorting through his possessions. He found Casey the Bear and memories flooded back.

Grandma Jean bought Casey for two-year-old Mimi long time ago. Jean passed away late the following year and Casey was forgotten. Mimi visited the farm sporadically as a teen.  A picture with my curly haired, blue-eyed toddler holding Casey in her arms was attached. Mimi, a miniature Snow-White beauty, was so much smaller than the bear that Casey appeared to occupy the entire photo.

Dad mailed Casey with a lovely note and more pictures from her rare visits to the farm.  Mimi wiped away a tear of sadness and joy, regret and closure, as she read the letter.

“Hi, Mimi!

Do you remember me, I’m Casey. Grandma Jean gave me to you when you were a little girl. I brought a picture along just in case you don’t remember.

I’ve been in a toy box for years. I am so glad to be out. A man, who said he was your father, rescued me. It has been so lonely in that box all these years and I have missed you.

No other little girls ever came to play with me. Where did you go? You were there one day then you never came back. Are you the same as in the picture? Will I recognize you?

Have you missed me, Mimi?

I am a little dusty and worn, but I am still just like I was all those years ago.

I was so glad when your father said he was going to make sure we were together again. I can hardly wait!

I will give you a BIG HUG when I see you.

Love,
Casey”
 

Mimi closed her sparkling eyes briefly and hugged the teddy bear so tightly as if to recapture a moment of that precious time, long forgotten but missed, the carefree days of innocence and play.

 

 

 

My Christmas Tree

As long as I can remember, my Dad came home every December with a scraggly blue spruce, fragrant with the scent of winter, tiny icicles hanging from the branches. The frozen miniature crystal daggers would melt quickly on Mom’s well-scrubbed parquet floor. I never knew nor asked where he had found it, or how he could afford it. His modest salary of $70 a month barely covered the rent, utilities, and food. Mom had to work as well to afford our clothes. Prices were subsidized by the government and salaries were very low for everybody regardless of education and skill. We had to make do with very little.

No matter how bare the branches of my Christmas tree were, it was magical to me. Two metal bars forged by hand helped Dad nail the tree to the floor at the foot of the couch where I slept in the living room that doubled as my bedroom. Our tiny apartment only had one bedroom where my parents slept.

Decorating it was a fun job every year since I made new decorations from colorful crepe paper. We had to be creative; we could not afford glass ornaments. We made paper cones covered with craftily rolled crepe paper and filled with candy. I hung small apples with red string, tiny pretzels, home-made butter cookies, candied fruit, raisins, and an occasional orange wrapped in tissue paper with strange lettering, coming all the way from Israel. Each year we bought 12 small red and green candles which we attached to the tree with small metal clips. We were careful to clamp them at the tip of the branch to keep the tree from catching fire when the candles were lit. The tree would live for two weeks before the prickly needles fell all over the living room floor.

One year I spent Christmas with uncle Ion and his wife. A gifted mechanical engineer, Ion could fix and build anything. He promised that he would fashion lights for his Christmas tree. He worked painstakingly for weeks, soldering tiny copper wires into bundles that stretched along the branches of the tree like a magical cascade to which he soldered at least 200 tiny bulbs sold as bike lights. It was a labor of love! When the wires were finally attached to a relay, the bulbs lit up like a waterfall. Nobody had such a fantastically blazing tree in the whole country. I was amazed at his dedication and craftiness and never forgot his fairytale Christmas fir.

We did not have a tree skirt but we used one of Mom’s hand-stitched table cloths. The whole apartment smelled like the fragrant mountains and, for a couple of weeks we forgot the misery that surrounded us. We lit up the 12 candles on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day.

Every night for two weeks, I would admire my enchanted tree until I fell asleep, wondering what special treat I would find under my pillow on Christmas morning. It was never much, but it was such a cherished joy!

Saint Nicholas Day was celebrated on December 6^th. We really didn’t know much about the real St. Nicholas, Santa Claus’s namesake. St. Nicholas was a popular saint in the Orthodox Church and presumed the bishop of Myra in Turkey in the 300s. There were many legends of St. Nicholas - the more famous story that he was the son of a wealthy family in Patara, Lycia. When his parents died, he gave away his fortune. One such random act of kindness involved throwing three bags of gold through the windows of three girls who were going to be forced into prostitution.

On Saint Nicholas Day, I would put my boots outside the door, hoping that they would be filled with candy in the morning and not coals. Grandpa had a wicked sense of humor – he would sometimes fill one boot with sticks and another with candy and a chocolate bar.

Grandpa never bought a blue spruce - we cut a fir tree from the woods. We were careful not to cut down a tree that had bird nests in it. We decorated it with garland made from shiny and multi-colored construction paper. We cut strips, glued them in an interlocking pattern and voila, we had our garland. For ornaments we used walnuts and shriveled apples from his cellar, tied with Grandma’s red knitting wool.

The warm adobe style fireplace built from mud bricks mixed with straw cast a dancing glow on the tree decked with  tokens of food, something our heathen Roman ancestors did during the celebration of Saturnalia. On December 17, the polytheistic Romans celebrated Saturnus, the god of seed and sowing, for an entire week. As Christians, we celebrated the birth of Christ and the religious traditions in our Orthodox faith, in spite of the communist regime forcing the transformation of Christmas into a secular holiday.

On Christmas Eve, after we ate Mom’s traditional Christmas supper, roasted pork, baked chicken, sarmale (stuffed cabbage rolls with ground meat and rice), and mamaliga (corn mush with butter cooked in a cast iron pot), we went to the midnight service at the Orthodox Church not far from our house. Sometimes it was a sloshy trek and other times it was icy and slippery. If we got lucky, a heavy snow would turn our walk into a winter wonderland with dancing snowflakes shining in the weak street lights. We had to bundle up well – the church was not heated and we circled it three times during the procession with burning candles in our hands. I always wore my flannel pajamas under many layers of warm clothes. To this day, pajamas are my favorite garment – cozy and comfortable, keeping my body warm.

I decorate my Douglas fir with beautiful lights and shiny ornaments now. My heart fills with loving memories of Christmases past and of family members lost who made our Christian traditions so special.

Growing up

My first memory was of a baby sleeping in a wooden carved crib on the floor of my parents bedroom. The rental house had a small kitchen and bathroom down the hallway. It was always cold - I cannot remember a time when I felt really warm except at my grandparents' house when they built a strong wood fire. Daddy used to blow warm air directly into my little hands and rub them together to warm them. We did not know which family the government had confiscated this home from, or where they lived. We were grateful to have it. Daddy paid a meager rent to the communist party each month. A small muddy yard surrounded the house and a decaying, broken fence. Having a lawn was a luxury that nobody could afford and cutting annoying, tall grass was a chore executed with a scythe. Nobody had heard of lawnmowers. Grass grew wild in patches. Anemic bulbs lit up each room and we considered ourselves lucky if the power stayed on continuously. Heat was delivered through steam radiators willy-nilly. We never knew when the plant would cut off our supply of steam. Grandma had made us heavy wool comforters that weighed a ton but provided heat during sleep. To stay warm during the day, we had to wear layers of hand-made wool garments. We even wore mittens most days because the winters were so frigid. It was not uncommon to put on several pairs of wool socks on top of each other to keep our feet warm. I always loved grandma's house because she could build a fire. Grandpa kept a steady supply of chopped wood and the ducts of the wood burning stove carried the warm air throughout the modest home. Her entire house was the size of a small studio apartment. The kitchen was outside, with a separate entrance, and the outhouse was in the back, close to the tool shed. Grandpa had an awning where he repaired bicycles and motorcycles. I was always fascinated watching him make spare parts from junk. McGyver would have been proud.

Because my parents were so poor and unprepared to care for an infant, I was sent to live with my maternal grandparents. My separation anxiety was severe. During summers, I would alternate homes and spent time at my paternal grandmother's home in the mountains. Life was more difficult and full of challenges. Water shortages were chronic. There was no such thing as bathing unless we took a dip in the river. Women climbed a mile or more to get water for cooking. We washed our clothes in the river or in a tiny wooden tub. We were not very clean, that's an understatement, everybody smelled pretty bad, but, after a while, we got used to it. Changing underwear once a week was a luxury. When it rained, we were in mud up to our ankles. It was pointless to wear shoes. The overflowing drainage/irrigation ditches became the kids' delight and grandma's nightmare. The cheap white cotton communist-issue underwear turned brown and stretchy permanently. Grandma got so mad when we waded in muddy water. No bleach to make underwear white again. She tried boiling them on the stove with detergent, stirring them with a stick to keep from burning herself - sometimes it worked. Habits die hard, I still have a bamboo stick to this day, I stuff wet clothes into the washing machine with it. It is 32 years old. My husband threatens to throw it away once in a while. Uncle Tache, who worked for a detergent factory for 40 years, "supplied" the chemicals. He was a scrawny man, always looked sickly, but strong as a mule. His offspring were mutants who never survived birth. The doctors told him to stop having children since he had been exposed to so many chemicals. Uncle Tache had lung issues all the time, yet he was still alive and active. The last baby he and aunt Nuta had, lived to six months although his cranium was missing a large piece of bone. Mamaia, Nuta, mom and I were bringing the dead baby from the hospital and, while riding the bus, it was hard to dodge the curious lookers who wanted to know why the baby was bundled so warmly in July. Orthodox tradition dictated that we bury him in a special corner of the cemetery since he had not been baptized.

Grandma Elisabeta was a tiny blond-haired beauty with piercing blue eyes, biting humor, and healthy common sense. She never met an idiot she did not dislike. She raised eight children by herself from the age of 32 after her husband died of stomach wounds from WWII. Back then marriages were arranged and she had married a man much older, 23 years her senior. She never varied her diet, she loved beans and chicken and ate it exclusively. Perhaps it was the good genes, perhaps the diet, she never had any surgery, never took any meds or vitamins and lived in her late eighties. Most of her nine brothers lived in their late nineties. She was the salt of the land, literally. Her vineyard and orchard were perched on top of a salt mountain. In her early seventies, the mountain decided to claim the top layers of soil and the whole face of the mountain slid down, taking farms, trees, and the livelihood of over 200 people with it. She had to relocate in the center of the village on a small patch of land that had a few plum trees, a quincy tree, pear trees, and an apple tree. Enticing aromas of fresh fruits mixed with crushed grapes emanated from grandma's cellar. Her youngest son, uncle Ion, built her a new house but she was never truly happy there. She missed her homestead and I really can't blame her, it was a real paradise that the communist collective could not reach. Her vineyard produced barrels of fruity wine when the grapes turned a golden hue. The house was spartan, devoid of furniture, save for the bed, the dresser, a table, and her 80 year old icon of the Virgin Mary with the 100 year old crucifix encrusted with rubies. The icon and the crucifix were the only items that survived the land slide. Although she had a room designated as kitchen, she always cooked on an iron grid outside under the shed. I could swear her beans and chicken tasted better that way.

Grandpa Mihai Apostolescu, who died at the age of 55, long before I was born, had built the house when they first got married. Elisabeta gave birth and raised all her eight children in this farmhouse. Dad told me, he could hear wolves howling at night in the dead of winter. The isolation would have been too much for a city person like me but my aunts and uncles did not seem to mind. They were mostly quiet people who spoke seldom unless asked. Grandma Elisabeta raised each child in the Christian Orthodox faith but aunt Leana, the oldest daughter, was the most devout. She was a deacon who never missed any event in the village life. Aunt Leana and her husband, Stelian, never had children of their own, but adopted a little girl from an infamous orphanage where people would abandon children they could not afford to feed and support. She became the apple of their eyes, indeed a very lucky girl. Grandpa was not particularly faithful to my grandmother and, as difficult as it was financially and economically when he passed away from war wounds, she was somewhat relieved that the specter of adultery was gone. I am sure she missed him dearly but refused to admit to the rest of us.

Maita, my special name for grandma, took me sometimes to village fairs across the mountains. It was an all day trek since there was no transportation beyond our own two feet. People would trade pottery, home-made canned food, honey, wine, liquors made from fruits, especially plum brandy, dried fruit, dried meat, hand-made cloth, rugs, and the occasional carnival ride would give us kids the thrill of a lifetime for pennies. A rickety bus used to come once a week to take people to the nearest town, 90 km away. One of my recurring daydreams was, a fast car would come and take me away to a nice, clean, foreign city. We were literally cut off from the world - no stores, no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency access. The communists did not care or worry that the majority of the population lived in abject poverty and unsanitary conditions so long as the regime knew where everybody was and under control. People were not encouraged to move away from their birthplace unless the government needed them for slave labor or "volunteer" work in the fields somewhere in the country to plant or harvest the crops. Soap and clean water were very hard to come by. My cousins and I would escape to the creek to frolic in the crystal clear water. This mild creek would turn into raging rapids during rains that could sweep away even the best swimmers. Unfortunately, none of us could swim. Adults did not seem to worry much and some kids did drown. Because we had one pair of shoes, we walked barefoot as much as we could. This meant that many kids had intestinal parasites picked up from the fecal matter of yard animals. We had no place to wash, no bathrooms, no running water, and whatever water we had, we used it for drinking and cooking. No wonder we picked up hook worms! If lucky, children would get a disgustingly sweet medicine, the consistence of honey, that killed parasites and restored health over a period of months. The suffering in the meantime was unrelenting. Kids had swollen bellies and many died before proper medicine was administered. The government was unapologetic and did not care. People were so poor and uneducated, they did not understand that their offspring died from lack of proper hygiene. I fell victim to these parasites as well. The medicine did not cure me until I was in my teens. I was lucky because my parents lived in the city and were able to get treatment. Many of my childhood friends were not so lucky.

Behind Maita's newer house was uncle Nicu's home, dad's oldest brother. His six children had to work very hard to provide food and shelter for themselves and the family. I was in awe, realizing that my cousins did not really have much of a childhood compared to a city kid like me. They had few books, no toys, no radio, no TV, no phone, and, for a long time, no electricity. The only light came from a petroleum lamp. It was not fair but they were happy to be able to farm a living without communist party ownership. Little did I know that they still had to pay the piper in the form of crop shares. Even the youngest children had chores early in the morning, fed the cows, the goats, the chicken, the geese, the rabbits, and the pig. These animals were very important as they provided milk, cheese, eggs, protein, feathers, and leather. I felt extremely privileged around my cousins since I got to be a child in spite of our poverty. I never had to really work hard until I was eighteen. I respected them for their work ethic but I wished they had their childhood back. After finishing high school in the one room school house, all six cousins left the village to learn a trade in the city. The boys had various professions ranging from policeman to businessman, while the girl became a great mom. None of them had very large families, 1-3 children.

I'd like to think sometimes that I escaped communism for an infinitely better life for myself and my future children, not because I was a restless soul in love. I am not sure my daughters appreciate the kind of sacrifice I have made to move to the U.S. and the life they would have lived had they been born in a communist country perhaps because they've never really seen true poverty. They never visited Romania. Yes, there is happiness in poverty but there is also misery and unnecessary suffering. Unfortunately, my children and millions of others are going to find out sooner than I thought, the effects of Utopian promises of redistribution of wealth. Nobody was wealthy in Romania, except the ruling elite. I sit in wonderment and ask myself, are the lives of Americans so deprived that they must give up everything they own for an empty promise of non-existent egalitarian socialism? Perhaps they are so self-absorbed, greedy, and self-indulgent, they want even more, and are willing to listen to and follow over the cliff any two-bit dictator who comes promising the Elysian Fields? There is a heavy price to pay when you lose your freedom to choose.

Nobody had air conditioning or had heard of it. Summers were hot but dry and torrid days were tolerable in the shade. There was a city pool but the water was not chlorinated and dark green from bacteria by the end of the week. It was disgusting, nobody wanted to swim in it, and when the city drained the water at the end of the week, they found gross things at the bottom and an occasional dead body. It was more sanitary to go to the river to cool off in summer time, fish, or swim. Most Romanian kids never learned to swim, there were no swimming lessons or teachers, you learned from others, if you were lucky. I was 23 years old and in the United States before I learned to swim. I went to the Black Sea some summers and stayed with my uncle Gelu's family. I never learned how to swim there - the water was pitch black with algae and quite scary. All sorts of invisible creatures were biting at my feet.

Grandpa Christache Ilie, mom's dad, was an amateur archaeologist and a skilled mechanic. Following him around on archaeological explorations helped keep my mind focused and my interest in education and learning. There was a Roman fort at the edge of the village Tirgsorul Vechi, with the ruins of an orthodox church on top. The archaeological digs were supervised by grandpa's friend, Nicolae. The highlight of my day was to follow both of them and observe everything they did. It was fascinating to watch them find a Roman child's sarcophagus with the intact skeleton, reddish hair, bits of clothing, Roman gold and silver coins, and precious jewels! Grandpa Christache was probably one of the few men in Romania with access to National Geographic in the early seventies. I remember falling in love with the glossy photographs although I could read no English whatsoever. These magazines were brought in by a crew from the United States who received college credit at a southern university to help with the Roman dig. I knew I wanted to see these marvelous places with my own eyes. I remember seeing pictures of Napoleon's tomb in Paris and dreamed someday to be there. My husband David took me on a ten day trip to Paris five years ago. He is a history buff and we both visited Musee d'Armee and Napoleon's mausoleum. My immodest childhood dream became reality thanks in part to my determination, fate, and my grandfather's passion for archeology and learning. I have certainly rifled enough through his coin collection, his books, and his memorabilia.

Tirgsorul Vechi had been a garrison for the German army during World War II and the villagers were occupied and unwilling participants in the collusion against the Allies. The biggest allied air raid during WW II had been 20 miles away, trying to destroy the seven refineries that were supplying oil to the German army. One American pilot had been downed in grandpa's back yard and he hid the location from the Germans until Americans could come and claim the remains. The Russians had "liberated" the village after the Germans had already surrendered and grandpa told horror stories of plunder and rape by the Russian soldiers. The Romanians were more comfortable with the German occupiers as they were gentlemen and first class surgeons, taking care of the medical and food needs of the village. One of mom's teenage friends had her face bitten by a horse and a German surgeon repaired it flawlessly. Knowing the atrocities the Third Reich had committed against humanity, it was hard to believe that kindness existed among the German officers, but I never doubted the veracity of grandpa Christache's stories.
A remarkable self-taught man, grandpa Christache was an athlete by need, he rode his bike to work for 40 years, rain or snow, 20 km a day. He was in excellent physical condition, yet doctors cut his life short at the age of 61 when they punctured his colon during a routine ulcer repair surgery. I say routine by western standards, there was nothing routine about any type of surgery under communists' free care, doctors were so ill prepared, most simple surgeries ended in disaster. I watched him die in the agony of gangrene and it will be forever etched in my memory. As a last good-bye, I kissed his cheek while he was in the casket, it felt like kissing a stone, not my lively, warm, and kind grandpa.

Grandpa Christache encouraged me to try new things, climb trees in his back yard, explore the environment, collect rocks, make mud pies, dig drainage ditches for irrigation, plant flowers, can vegetables for the winter, explore the fauna and flora around his farm, fish, collect frogs and leeches, and be kind to all domesticated animals on the farm. I watched him in awe repair just about anything. His hands were made of gold. If grandpa could not fix something, it probably was not worth fixing. He reminded me of the enterprising Cubans who still run 1950s Buicks by improvising parts and repairs.

My second early recollection of my childhood happened when I was four years old, playing in mom's kitchen in a large bowl filled with corn meal. I was making "sand castles" while mom was preparing the traditional "mamaliga" made of corn meal as a substitute for bread. A stranger knocked on our door and told mom to go to the hospital because daddy had been hurt and was bleeding to death internally. I did not understand what communists were, why they beat him, what bleeding internally meant, and why they would want to hurt my sweet daddy. Mom dragged me onto the bus, we walked endlessly, it seemed to me like days, and, when we got to the hospital, daddy was alive, barely clinging to life. I cried because he looked so pale and unresponsive and it scared me. Everyone was praying and whispering. I touched his hand and reached over to kiss him. Several relatives guarded him around the clock until he was out of danger. After two weeks of hospitalization, dad was released on the promise to eat well and stay out of trouble.