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.

 

 

The Flushing Outhouse

Ray loves to tell stories about his childhood of long ago America - his eyes twinkle with excitement. He was a teen in rural West Virginia of 1950, carefree and happy. His parents’ farmhouse lacked indoor plumbing, not that it bothered the boys that much. They bathed every Saturday evening before church in the family washtub in the kitchen after the adults in the household.

Water was heated on the stovetop and everyone took their turns in the same soapy water, gradually turning into muddy brown. The metal tub was large enough to accommodate one person sitting in a crouched position. By the time the boys got to bathe, the water was dirty and lukewarm. The adage, “don’t’ throw the baby out with the bathwater” was certainly true.

It was a royal treat in summertime to wash in the creek that crossed the farm nearby. The boys learned to swim there, frolicked in their underwear, drank the water, and took baths upstream or downstream, wherever was most convenient at the moment. The creek was their refrigerator as well. In the shallows, they kept bottles of fresh, unpasteurized cow’s milk. In August, the creek kept watermelons cold.

It did not bother Ray that the outhouse was hanging over the creek upstream on stilts, dumping its contents in the water. When a summer deluge came, the tiny creek would swell to raging rapids, overflowing its banks, and floating the outhouse away. The local bridge, a tenth of a mile downstream, would stop the outhouse from its treacherous descent.

Ray’s dad and the boys would bring it back to its resting place, closer to the farmhouse, dragging it through sand and mud with sleds pulled by horses.

The interior was always a sandy, muddy mess and the cleanup with shovels and buckets took hours. Once the outhouse was resting again on its stilts, all cleaned up, nobody was too upset over the hard work they had just completed, but everyone bemoaned the loss of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, their free toilet paper.

Happy as coons in a corn field, the boys took turns swinging naked from the trees around the banks, dropping into a deeper hole, splashing in the swollen creek. Most became good swimmers by necessity, yet it was a miracle that nobody drowned.

The creek was truly the nature’s bounty in a time when people had to be creative to survive. Nobody knew much about modern conveniences nor cared. Ray’s family’s outhouse was the only “flush toilet” for miles around.

My new home in Woodland

I was too excited, scared, and anxious to sleep. Every object, smell, landscape looked utterly unfamiliar and scary. I did not know how to act, the English I learned in school did not resemble at all the Southern slang I was hearing. I had to ask Bill to explain to me what people said all the time. I felt lonely, isolated, and did not trust anything or anybody. I was expecting a knock on the door any moment to take me away to jail. Every time I saw a policeman, sheriff, or a State Trooper my heart would race and I fully expected them to ask me for my papers. I was finally free from communism but did not understand anything around me. I needed time to explore my new found freedom. I could not understand why the population could come and go as they wished without the government giving them permission and without legally notarized papers , why they could move from town to town, state to state, change jobs, own property, or do anything for that matter. Surely, there must have been some centralized power that pulled the strings to make this society run so smoothly. My understanding of how capitalism ran so successfully without any centralized interferrence was minimal.
The next morning the constant parade of visitors began - I was a novelty, almost like a new circus act in town that everybody had to come gawk at, touch, and ask question of, marvelling at my foreign accent and my "exotic" looks. If I had to hear the word exotic one more time, I was going to explode. People would ask stupid and insensitive questions out of sheer ignorance. "Do they take a bath in Romania?" "Sure, once a month, whether we need it or not." I felt compelled at first to answer the idiotic questions truthfully, but, after a while, it got old, and I had to improvise by being sarcastic or cocky. I had as much fun with it as I was legally allowed to do so. "Do women drive in Romania?" Not really, we still use wagons with oxen." That was not so far from the truth in country areas where people were still pretty backwards, riding wagons with wheels made of car tires, pulled by horses. I was fascinated by the fact that even the most remote farms in the boondocks had plumbing and indoor bathrooms. That was so unbelievable to me, the septic tank was a novelty since my grandparents and the family at large that lived in rural areas still used a hole in the ground covered with wooden slats, good luck trying not to fall in the big goo of poop. I still remember my grandparents' water source - a hand pump that resembled the 1900s water pumps. As a matter of fact, my paternal grandmother took her drinking water from a well about two miles up the mountain. It was fun coming down, but way too difficult climbing with a big wooden bar over your shoulders, balancing two heavy buckets, one on each end. Has anybody seen a bathtub or shower in the country? Not really. My maternal grandfather, ever the enterprising engineer, had rigged a rusted bucket over the outhouse for impromptu showers when the August sun was strong enough to warm the water. We would pull a string, tilt the bucket, and the entire content would rinse the pre-soaped body. That was our shower. Did we take showers in winter? Noooo! They still had Turkish baths in the city. Villagers could bathe once in a while for a meager fee - the interior looked positively medieval, dank, dingy, dirty, dark, and quite smelly. It was alwyas frightening to go with my mother when the communist government would cut our hot water off in the city in summer time or cut water off period for reasons of rationing. The official excuse was that they had to clean the large vat of mineral deposits. This process took three to four months each summer. You can imagine how spoiled and priviledged I felt in the backwoods of Mississippi having a hot shower, runing water, and an indoor commode. I felt positively rich. Gone were the summers when we pooped in the corn fields because the outhouse stunk. Grandpa always lectured us on the bacterial sins of befouling the corn crops. The corn looked greener and healthier to me and it tasted even better.
The next dog and pony show was going to the Baptist Church with my new "family." I did not know what to expect since my mother-in-law believed I was pagan since I was orthodox. She considered our marriage in an orthodox cathedral with four priests non-existent since it was not performed in the Baptist Church. Never mind that the Orthodox Church was one of the oldest religions in the world, she insisted that we had to marry again, otherwise our children would be bastards. I learned not to object much so as not to raise the ire of my new in-laws. I agreed with her, or pretended to, but I did what I thought was the proper thing to do as an orthodox christian.
The most ardent defender of my new status was Tom, Mr. Johnson's hired hand who had a heart of gold but was poor as a church mouse. I could never understand what he said, I would have needed a dictionary for that, and he was pretty much toothless on account of his smoking habits, but he did teach me a few choice idiomatic expressions and introduced me to wild game, especially fried snapping turtle from one of the farm's many ponds - it tasted like chicken.