The Traditions and the Families We Take for Granted

As far as I can remember, Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations were depressing for kids unless it snowed heavily and they could go sledding, ice skating in the streets, and having snowball fights with all the children residing in the apartment complex. Being stuck in a cold apartment, layered to the hilt to stay warm, with nothing to do except read, was really miserable for most kids. We wanted to be outdoors.

It was depressing to watch our parents struggle to find food to cook a special meal for Christmas, for the New Year, and to make ends meet on small state salaries. We were too young, but we understood the word “no” and the phrase, “we can’t afford it.” There was more food in the stores provided for the masses, but the lines were still endless.

Dad always found a small Christmas tree which brought into our small apartment the fragrant essence of fir, bright, shiny colors, and cheer. The kitchen smelled like roasted chicken and pork chops, potatoes, fried sausages made by grandpa, mamaliga (polenta made with yellow corn meal), and mom’s special cornulete (little horns) baked with walnuts, cocoa, sunflower oil, and powdered sugar.

When mom could find beef, she made us a special salad called salata de Boeuf, boiled chopped beef, boiled and chopped potatoes, green peas, and mixed with homemade mayonnaise. The job of mixing the eggs until the mayo took shape was mine on account of my young hands and arms which did not get tired and achy as quickly. We did not have a mixer and frankly, I had never seen one until I came to the United States as an adult. I had never seen any other kitchen appliance or vacuums that most people in the West took for granted.

Mom also made a special Christmas bread, cozonac, with Turkish delights and chopped walnuts folded in cocoa. The loaf was drizzled with a mixture of egg and butter, and it smelled divine while baking in the gas oven.

We were not drinkers, but dad brought home for the holidays two bottles of wine and some plum brandy or rum. It was a tradition to toast the New Year with a full glass of wine in hopes that life in the coming year would be easier and good health and luck would prevail.

We went to grandma’s Orthodox Church in the village on Christmas Eve. When the mass ended, the congregation circled the church three times with burning candles in celebration of Jesus’s birth. The church was empty throughout the year, save for the older ladies in the village who attended regular services, but during Christmas and Easter the church was always full. Those who mustered the courage to attend came to church to praise the birth of Jesus and to pray for a better life.

People shared their extra holiday food with the less fortunate, those alone, sick, widowed, or left without any family.

Christmas time was for families to be home with their loved ones and New Year’s Eve was the time to have a party with the extended family, usually in the country where food and drink was more plentiful. People had gardens and canned a lot, and some raised pigs to feed many at Christmas. It was the time of the year when we had the most protein and everyone shared in the bounty.

Holidays became more sedate as the years flew by and we got older. We have plenty of food now but fewer and fewer people to share it with. The Christmas tree seems lonely without the laughter of children. There is no Bogart to drink the tree water and to sleep under the low hanging ornaments and the twinkling lights. He crossed the Rainbow Bridge five years ago.

Mom died a year and a half ago and her loss changed our lives fundamentally. She was our matriarch, the super glue that kept our small family together. Her happy spirit is always with us. She is finally reunited with my dad in Heaven.

Our people have scattered around the world, with their own families, unable to visit their loved ones. Many passed away. Gone are the times when the children remained in the same village or even the same town with their parents. They have dispersed everywhere for better opportunities and to build their own homes, seldom returning to the place they were born in or spent their formative years.

It is true, you can never go back home, you will not find what you were looking for because life has moved on, but the Christmas traditions we once took for granted will endure no matter where we are, and so will the memories.

Yearning to Find That Special Thing and Place

Everybody comes from somewhere special, a farm, a lake, an island, the desert, a faraway mountain, a town, a hamlet, a large city, a foreign country, or a place no one else has heard of. And each person has a story, real or fantasized.

If you ask each person, their place is the best in the world, the most beautiful, most bountiful, most colorful, and so special that tomes had been written about it, yet here they are. They are so far away and yearning to get back to that amazing place they identify with – a place of wonder, love, friends, cherished memories, and family, with all the things they perceive as missing in the present.

People adorn their cars with flags and bumper stickers, names of the places they miss, and photos of deceased loved ones. They wear memorabilia on their sleeves or place things in their yards and homes that remind them of their homes. The yearning is so raw and powerful, exposed to the world to see, that you can’t help but wonder why they left in the first place.

But they can never go back home again or to that unique place for many reasons. The most profound is that home and everything around it they remembered has moved on and changed. Whatever one is searching for, it is no longer there. Landscapes change, natural disasters remodel the earth, buildings are demolished to make room for parks, new areas develop, high rises are built, streets are redrawn, regimes change, people get old and move on, and people die. The obsession, the place, the person, the unidentifiable “je ne sais quois,” is no longer there.

The new home overwhelms life here and now; time robs everything and everyone; people try to adjust to the new place, the new reality, and time continues to fly, hour by hour. Humans make new friends, build families, bring old ones with them, but that something special from long ago is missing – a certain food, a smell, a custom, a song, a mysterious perfume, flowers, a lilac bush, or grandma’s garden with scented roses in full bloom.

The smell of machine oil brings back memories of my grandfather. His repair shop with a myriad of old tools, under the lean-to by the adobe house, had been torn long ago by his grandson who inherited the house. It was personally sad to see it gone. But his cellar was still there, and I did not have to go down the steps to smell the cool and earthen damp air, the potatoes, the onions, the garlic strung up on braided stalks, and the fresh apple scent, it was all in my olfactory memory.

The fragrance of the white mulberry tree I found one day in Virginia, and the sweet aroma of its fruits brought back memories of my childhood adventures to the corn field and the lone and majestic walnut tree behind grandma’s house. I wished to go back to see those trees one more time and, when I did, they were gone. One succumbed to disease and the walnut tree had been cut down because it got so massive that it was shading the rows of corn too much. The delicious walnuts of my memory were no longer there but I could still recall my stained hands from picking walnuts when the green shells were falling off, but it had plenty of dye left in the pulp.

As we age and become wiser and more in touch with our purpose on earth, we yearn to return to our roots in the never-ending circle of life, but the roots are no longer there either any more than the memories of those with whom we shared a common trunk and branches – they have all scattered into the winds to set roots elsewhere or to enrich the earth.

NOTE: What is that special thing and place you want to return to?

Fun Memories of Paris

My husband’s memories of Paris were quite different from mine as if we were on different trips. We agreed that it was a cold and damp December that year. We visited during Christmas and New Year because we wanted to listen to the service at Notre Dame; we even climbed to the catwalk to see the gargoyles up close and the river Seine.

It was very damp, expensive, the French were very rude to Americans, and it smelled like urine everywhere.  And we had to watch for dog poo before we stepped in the streets in the endless drizzly rain.

Aside for the enthusiasm for our visit to Napoleon’s mausoleum and tombs of other generals, and the very interesting military museum, our memories partied ways.

I was enthralled by all the culture, the art, and the city’s history. It saddened me to see so much opulent beauty surrounding us, knowing how many people had suffered and paid for all this beauty with their forced labor and ultimately with their lives.

We stayed in a hotel in Montmartre, and I can honestly say that I’ve never been so cold in a hotel before. We trekked daily through the rainy streets to the metro where the loudspeakers, without fail, would make the same announcement on the train, in different languages, that, ladies and gentlemen, “robbers were on the train.”

We walked by the cemetery daily and sometimes past the metro station to Sacre Coeur where couples were loitering on the steps smoking and throwing their cigarette butts and trash on the ground. What a sacrilege! 

David liked the sunny side up egg on the pizza served in a restaurant at Versailles and the fresh and delicious pastries and croissants baked by men with hairy arms. He still remembers the fresh baguettes at the train station cafe in Paris buzzed by flies inside. You would think that they would go dormant in December! 

The well-manicured gardens and parks would have been lovely except for the fact that they were all dormant and the trees were brown. A few lovely potted flowers decorated Notre Dame.

Bathrooms were hard to come by which may explain the offensive smell of urine permeating everywhere but especially in the metro corridors and tunnels. It costs money everywhere to use the restrooms, even in cafes, one euro on the average, and in the round restrooms in the middle of the street that stunk to high Heaven.  They reminded me of Dr. Who’s time travel phone booth. 

A fun and delicious Greek restaurant in the vicinity of Notre Dame encouraged patrons to break plates on men’s heads. At his request, I hit my hubby with a plate but on the wrong side. It did not break and luckily, we are still married. He claims that I caused the dent visible on his bald head. Just kidding about the dent part. 

We went on the same trip to Paris but I vividly, not vaguely, remember many details and the beauty surrounding us inside museums and outside majestic buildings. Hubby remembered expensive restaurants and street food and the fact that we almost got mugged by the Eiffel Tower by a gypsy kid. 

I also enjoyed pretending that I did not speak any French because I wanted to hear how rudely the French spoke of the two of us before I responded to the pretentious and arrogant waiters.

 

Reminiscing with Milica on Epiphany

I just spoke to my childhood friend Milica for 45 minutes. It is January 6, 2023, Epiphany for Christians, Boboteaza” in our Romanian Orthodox faith. We were reminiscing about our life in the communist apartment block, the togetherness in misery, pain, and other little things in life that stood out in our memories.

She remembered my dad on this day, gathering the children to take them to church. My grandmother Elizabeta was deeply religious, she fasted every Lent, and his sister Leana was a cantor in her village church. Emilia went to ask her dad if she could go, and her dad replied, “only if you are going to wear your pioneer uniform and red scarf.”

Emilia’s dad was a communist activist at the factory where he “worked.” His job was to indoctrinate the workers who were not yet convinced to fully support the communists, and to rat out those like my dad who were totally against the communist party and its dictator.

Her dad had a soothing voice, sounded convincing in his erroneous arguments and judgment, and had a towering presence that we kids feared. In exchange for his “work,” the party gave him a salary and extra rations of food for his family of four. His apartment was the same size as ours, but they always had food and sometimes things we had not seen or eaten in years.

Milica’s mom was a skilled seamstress and made extra money which allowed them to buy things and provisions on the underground illegal market. We girls, the five of us, would sometimes have treats at Emilia’s apartment if her mom felt generous that day to share with us whatever she was cooking. It was not often, but it was something to look forward to.

My dad disliked Milica’s father because he was a snitch and a communist stooge. I did not realize that Milica resented her dad’s activities when she found out later in life. When he died, she said, she threw out all his books and propaganda materials, i.e. The Communist Manifesto and other Karl Marx works, Lenin, Frederick Engels, and Stalin pamphlets and books. I wish she had preserved them for posterity, to teach those that come about the evils of communism. She said, half-jokingly, I could have sold them for good money today.

When I told Milica about my former students and about 50% of Americans who think communism is preferable to capitalism, she was shocked. She was saddened that America, to whom most of the world look up to for trends, advice, and inspiration, is going to be communist. She said, “Then we are all going to be communists again and they are going to confiscate our private property.  Are they crazy? Do they not realize how badly we lived for decades and how we barely survived?”

 

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

Learn Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese

I remember sitting in my Russian language class, taught by a wonderful, soft-spoken teacher, while my eyes glazed over because the language sounded so much harsher than the lovely sing-song Italian language which I adored and learned on my own after I learned German in school.

I would sit in the back of the class not just because I was one of the taller females but because I wanted to do crossword puzzles away from the teacher’s prying eyes. I did learn Russian, but she was teaching us Russian language for business and trade and, years later, I wished I had paid more attention. Some of my classmates were happy that they finally learned the Cyrillic alphabet and got a passing grade.

A former university colleague started a program for elementary schools in the area, using high school students to teach young American students Spanish under the guise that Spanish-speaking people have a hard time learning English and, it won’t be long before they will dominate society, and why not make it easier for the rest of us by learning their language? I found that statement dubious since she was making it in the 1990, but it appears that she was right.

There is nothing wrong with countries adopting the language of another conquering or invading society, especially when the invaded country does not have an official language. It had happened many times throughout history and especially during the Roman Empire. Although the administrative language was Latin, the conquered tribes mixed their local dialects with Latin which resulted over time in the Romance languages of today, i.e., Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Romansh, and Portuguese.

Given our economic situation right now, perhaps we should learn Mandarin Chinese as well as Russian.

Memories of Cold Winters

A recent snow overwhelmed a village.
Photo: Bing

It is bitter cold outside, it feels like 11 degrees Fahrenheit. The relentless Hawk is blowing arctic air, exacerbating the wind tunnel effect surrounding our house. Luckily, we are warm and cozy inside, thanks to capitalism.

When I was a kid growing up with my maternal grandparents, their tiny adobe style mud-brick winter house had two rooms, a barn for the animals, a tiny kitchen, and the hay loft for cats and mice. They never heated the big brick house because it required too much wood which they did not have. The communist farms had already deforested anything that could be cut down and used for wood.

The winters were bitter cold, and we stayed inside to stay warm. It was not unusual to have 5 feet of snow the entire winter. The whole country was situated above the 45 parallel north and all winters were extremely cold, with fast freezing temperatures and mountains of snow for months on end.

We had a whole mountain of salt at Slanic, that is something the Communist Party could not screw up in mining and delivering where it was needed. When the fresh snow melted in the city after generous treatment of roads with salt, because the sewers could not manage so much ice melt all the time, the streets turned into veritable ankle-deep rivers, with buses spraying the pedestrians with muddy grey slush and water. In many spots, the mountains of snow plowed off the streets protected the pedestrians from being soaked by passing cars and buses, but on larger streets, with pedestrian crosswalks, if you did not have tall rubber boots to handle the shallow river, or you were unlucky to cross when a vehicle drove by, you could count on taking a shower of dirty icy water.

Snow stayed more pristine in the country, 9 km (5.6 miles) away from the city only because the bus only ran twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, providing that it did not break down along the way.

Somebody had to go out and feed the animals and that somebody was usually grandma. Grandpa was busy fixing someone’s bike so they could ride to work or to see their relatives at the far end of the village.

My aunts Nuta and Nicuta lived at the end of the village, and I rode a bike many times to see them in summertime, never in winter. We walked from there to the crystal-clear river about one km away, with large fish swimming about. We were not afraid even though none of us could swim – the fearless ignorance of youth.

Grandpa rode his bike to work in bitter cold in winter. The round trip was 18 km (11.2 miles). If it sounds like a short distance, it was, but try doing that in subzero temperatures, surrounded by nothing but flat prairies, with no trees in sight to block the wind and gales of icy snow cutting your face like tiny daggers. It might as well have been to the moon and back to me.

All those cats living in the hayloft brought about fleas and did not make much dent in the rodent population living in the walls because I could hear them playing catch at night. Grandpa dusted the cats periodically with DDT but the fleas hitched rides and returned with a vengeance. We were covered in flea bites but warm from the wood stove. Good thing nobody developed allergies or terrible itching reactions and rashes from so many bites as there were no meds to be found in the socialist paradise we lived under.

I was so relieved when I was old enough to go to first grade and move in with my parents in the city into a much larger space of about 450 square feet. It felt like a cold palace in wintertime but no flea bites. And I had way more kids living in the same apartment complex to play with.

 

Christmas, the Season of Faith, Family, and Charity

Photo: Ileana Johnson

 Christmas was my Dad bringing home proudly a scraggly fir with sparse branches - fragrant with the smell of winter, tiny icicles hanging from the branches, miniature crystal daggers, melting on my mom’s well-scrubbed parquet floor. I never knew nor asked how he could afford it from his $70 a month salary that barely covered the communist subsidized rent, utilities, and food. No matter how bare the branches of my Christmas tree were, it was magical to me.

We decorated it together with home-made paper baskets filled with hard candy, raisins, and small butter cookies, crepe paper garlands, small pretzels, an orange wrapped in fine tissue paper coming all the way from Israel, a few apples dangling from a string, and 12 red and green 3-inch candles clipped carefully away from overhanging branches that could catch on fire.

Mom’s hand-stitched table cloth made a convenient tree skirt. 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.

I fell asleep and woke up every morning setting my eyes on the scented tree. It lasted two enchanted weeks before the dried needles fell all over the floor.

Christmas was lighting one of the 12 candles for a few minutes every night, careful not to set the tree on fire, basking in the soft glow while Daddy’s twinkly eyes were beaming with pride that he made his family happy once more. We were rich with love and God’s blessings.

Christmas was standing in shorter lines for freshly baked bread, butter, milk, cooking oil, flour, sugar, and the small pork roast mom always baked in the gas oven. Grandpa’s homemade smoked sausages with pretzels toasted on the stove top were always on the menu. Grandpa used to joke that life was so spectacularly good, even the dogs ran around with pretzels on their tails. Pretzels were sold by big bags, hard and stale, but toasting them on the stove made them taste just baked.

Christmas was Daddy opening the ceremonial bottle of red wine freshly brewed that year by cousin Mircea from Grandma Elizabeta’s vineyard grapes.

Christmas were the village carolers in hand-sewn folk costumes coming door to door, trudging through 3 ft. of snow, pulling a plough decorated with a real fir tree, singing traditional songs and snapping their whips in spite of the Communist Party moratorium, forbidding the observance of such religious traditions.

Christmas was sneaking at midnight to the village Orthodox Church with aunt Leana, the singing deacon, lighting candles and praying, surrounding the building when the crowd overflowed its tiny confines into the yard and the cemetery. The cold chilled us to the bone but the inside eventually warmed from our bodies, the candles, and the excitement of prayers and closeness to God.

Christmas was eating with my Mom and Dad, feeling full, happy, and loved in our tiny apartment, sometimes sharing meals with family members who had traveled far to be with us. The spare wool comforter aunt Nicuta had woven, a blanket, and set of sheets painstakingly hand washed would make cozy beds on the floor for the tired traveler – no fire place to light up, just the coils of steam heat which the government generously made sufficiently hot during Christmas to make up for the cold misery during the winter.

Christmas was peering in the shop windows at the glass ornaments we could not afford but I wished I had. They were made in Poland, whimsical fairy tale characters, no religious symbols of any kind, they were “verboten.”

Every Christmas I longed to have the same doll in the window at Omnia department store, dressed with miniature detailed  clothes, real curly hair, blue eyes, and eyelashes. I never asked my Dad because Mom said it cost three months of his salary. I still had my raggedy cloth doll aunt Stella, the village seamstress, had made for me when I was two years old. When my first child was born, Dad mailed her a large doll similar to the one I had longed for. The doll was so big, it stayed in a corner untouched. My spoiled children had too many other toys to play with and never appreciated the sacrifice their Granddad had made in sending such a gift of love.

On Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, 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 switches and another with candy and a chocolate bar. Chocolate was always in short supply and hard to find.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

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 garlands 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 Grandma’s traditional Christmas supper, roasted pork, 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 her 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.

When my children were born, Christmas became a tradition of toys and happiness seen through squeals of innocence and twinkly eyes when unwrapping a favorite game, book, toy, stuffed animal, or bike. I taught my children to be charitable and to share with other children who were less fortunate than we.

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

I hope and pray that American Christmas traditions will be passed on to future generations to light up the season of faith, family, and charity.



Note: An abbreviated version of this article appeared in my first book, Echoes of Communism, 2010 edition.

A Comforter for Comfort

Photo wikipedia

An unknown grandma in her winter kitchen that looked 

just like grandma Elena's

The temperatures dropped overnight to almost freezing. I added another snowy white cotton blanket on the bed and, as the soft material flurried to the bed surface like pristine snow, a flashback from my childhood hit me – grandma Elena’s heavy comforter, “plapuma” as we called it, maroon on one side and dark blue on the other. It was stuffed with plenty of wool for warmth, extremely heavy, and just big enough to cover the full-size bed.  I had no idea how she washed it, I never saw her do it, I only saw it hanging on the fence, airing it out from time to time. It had a duvet soft cover which was washed periodically.

The comforter was hand-quilted on both sides with heavy wool and a very large and long needle that managed to penetrate all the layers of wool batting. We had to sleep in fetal position, cuddling for warmth, lest feet and hands dangled outside and got cold during the night in such low temperatures that often frosted the windowpanes.

The pillows were stuffed with the chicken feathers we sacrificed for protein from time to time when the hens stopped laying eggs. Feathers were still attached to quills that would poke us through the pillowcase fabric and sometimes made their way out floating to the ground. The inner cases were made of thick and heavy fabric meant to contain the feathers. The outward decorative pillowcases were a work of art, hand-embroidered with flowers and intricate stitchery, starched and pressed with love and perfection. Such pillowcases and matching embroidered sheets were part of a bridal trunk dowry. Nobody had fitted sheets for their mattresses or a box spring for that matter.

If we were lucky the mattress was stuffed with seaweed or shorn wool, washed, combed, and dried. Many in the village had rough jute mattresses stuffed with straw and were glad to have it.

In summertime the beds were adorned with thin woven blankets with intricate patterns and quite colorful. Aunt Ana was a master weaver who made such beautiful blankets in her loom which occupied a small room in her home. I still see her sitting in front of the threads of the looms, feeding wooden spools of thread through, one row at a time, a work of art that took months to complete. It was fascinating to watch her work so fast, never missing a string in the complicated weave. Row after row she had to change the spools with colors that completed whatever complicated patterns she was working on. She never used a paper blueprint, it was all in her head, her eagle eyes, and her hands.

I am looking at my comforter, silky synthetic material probably woven and manufactured in China by skillful hands. The cleaners will dry it on their racks or driers, no exposure on the fence or pooping birds while drying it fully. It is comfortable, light, warm, and useful but it is not a work of art made by aunt Ana’s skillful hands.

I remember grandma Elena making small rugs from hand-woven strips of old clothes, rugs just big enough to step on when we first got out of bed and the room was just above freezing temperatures. She did not want us to step on the cold floor. And the ever-present chamber pot was hidden under the wooden bed which grandpa had fashioned in his little shop attached to the house, a modest lean-to that was absolutely frigid in winter.

The communists did not bother to produce comforters, it was up to a few skilled hands in the city or in the village who produced enough to sell to other people for a modest fee. I was always in awe that the Communist Party allowed such home-artisans to make something. I suppose since it was such an unprofitable endeavor, if you took into account the number of hours devoted vs. the actual price, they did not bother to censure its existence.

Southern Seasons

Photo: Ileana Johnson 20018

How many southern season are there? It depends on who you ask. If you ask me and I don’t know why you would, as my opinion does not count for much, there are many.

The winter of 1978, my first year in Mississippi’s America was a pretty brutal winter, snow, rain, ice, and subzero temperatures, all knitted together in an ugly weather sweater. But then tornadoes came and I was confused, followed by heavy flooding rain and then ice. Within a month’s span on the farm, I witnessed most of God’s meteorological designs for the south and, while beautiful in their own devastating way, they were quite damaging to livestock and nature and frightening to a city girl who wanted to go back from whence she came.

The muddy creek, its shallow tributaries, and the small containment ponds overflowed their banks. Fish, snapping turtles, and water moccasins floated near and inside homes as if the mud cleaning was not bad enough. I never understood why a mother called Nature would wreak so much havoc on her own children. She had a temper for sure.

There was flash flooding in people’s homes who were unfortunate enough to live close to the Tombigbee River. Hail came at the most inconvenient crop seasons. Weekly tornado sirens in town were like the chiming bells of a church announcing the passage of time.

The landscape sported damaged homes, roofs, garages, and businesses in different stages of clearing, repair, or rebuilding from last months or last year’s tornado that had touched down somewhere in the area.

Sideways stinging rain, high winds, and flying leaves were God’s way of throwing lancets, reminding us to repent, pray for good weather, and stop complaining about 100 plus humid days when the most stoic of us would melt in a heap of sweat.

The icy days snapped the power lines and turned trees into a wonderland of dangling crystals ready to fall and impale the unfortunate person walking too close. Broken powerlines were not for the faint of heart and not for the foolhardy who dared to step on them. We had no electricity for days, usually during the hottest or coldest days of the year when you had just gone to Walmart and filled the fridge and freezer with food which would then promptly spoil and had to be thrown out.

We showered where we could, at the gym, in a hotel room if we could afford to get one or did without bathing for days whether we needed or not. It did not matter, everyone else smelled pretty bad too.

And then there were the times when it was so cold outside, we brought the gas barbecue grill inside to heat but left the front door open for dangerous gases to escape.

No neighbors asked if we were dead or alive, everyone was pretty much in the same boat – no food, no water, no electricity, and no heat or A/C.

And then there were days when the heat pump froze – on the coldest day of the year or the hottest day of the melting summer. We turned in beds like roasting cockroaches.

Speaking of cockroaches the size of a small hand and athletic and aerodynamic enough to fly, there was open season for them all year long no matter how much we sprayed. We exterminated ourselves with Raid but not the resilient cockroaches.

So we had many seasons in the south, so many that I lost count in most years: fools spring, brief spring followed by mild winter before Easter, whimsical blustery wind season, early summer followed by Indian summer, Just kidding spring again, pollinating season, a season that plagued us year around, tornado season, hurricane season on the coast, actual spring, late winter in April, spring of trickery, flu season, tick season, early fall, mid-fall, winter for a day before Thanksgiving, and then summer again all day on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

That pretty much covers it. Come to think if it, I’ve never had to shovel snow and could only build a snowman once or twice in 30 years. That’s a blessing since my tennis elbow gives me fits even though I’ve never played tennis in my life.

Memories of Maita

Maita's house, after a fresh coat of paint in 2012

Maita’s real name was Elizabeta. Her intense blue eyes and will power could pierce through steel. She wore her long light brown hair tight in a bun and covered with a dark bandana to protect her head and face from the intense sunlight. With advanced age, her thick hair turned snow white. A tiny spitfire of a woman of maybe 80 lbs., she lost her husband in her early thirties, leaving her to raise eight children alone. Grandpa Mihail was a busy man, in-between farm chores and fathering children. Dead long before I was born, I was told that daddy favored him the most, out of three boys and five girls.

The clay-brick and wooden logs homestead was perched on a beautiful mountain surrounded by fruit orchards and small vineyards. Underneath the rich black soil were layers upon layers of salt that would someday doom the entire side of the mountain and the small farms as the topsoil slid down the foothill crashing everything in its path, trees, homes, barns, and vineyards, burying everything many families held dear for generations.  Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt as most people were working other fields or in government factories at the edge of the nearest town.

The communist party rulers made a meek attempt at helping those who lost their homes by offering them for sale small plots of land elsewhere in the village, not so isolated from their grasp.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2012

 

The front porch would offer a shady respite in summer time but in wintertime hungry wolves would be so brazen as to climb the few front steps in their quest for food.  Shiny eyes could be seen in the dark followed by hair-raising howls echoing in the distance, sometimes really close.

The chicken coup and shed were safe and tightly latched. The pig, sheep, and the cow, which provided milk, butter, and cheese for her large family, were also sheltered and locked at night.

Maita's gate and grapevines

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2011

 

Each child had a well-defined role and daily chores in her family. There were no idle little hands; everyone had to care for each other and to earn their keep. The most hated chore was walking up and down the mountain to the deep well activated by a wooden chained bucket and a wheel and covered by a heavy wood cover to prevent debris, animals, and small children from falling in. With each trip, boys had to carry back to the house two large buckets of ice-cold water balanced on a very heavy stick on both shoulders.

If a lot of snow accumulated, the clusters of trees, vines, and the orchards kept it in place; now and then mini-avalanches would bury some trees and fences in their path.

When the three boys were old enough to get jobs in the city, they joined the village men on the open transport truck. Traveling like cattle every day on the bumpy unpaved road for miles of miserably wet or frigid weather to a menial job, they resigned themselves to the proletariat’s  fate, working for slave wages for the communist utopia which pretended to protect them. On at least one occasion, a passenger was let off at his stop but he never made the long walk on foot up the mountain to his home; he was found frozen in the ditch along the way. After a six-month period of mourning, the tough life moved on.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2012

 

Sound carried so well across the valleys that it was hard to judge how far people or animals making the sounds were. As a child, I often heard aunt Leana calling out from the front porch of her tiny house above the tree lines to Maita’s home, telling us to come for lunch or a special treat she had baked. And it was a long and breath-taking hike to her house or so it seemed to a small child.

I would judge the distance based on the beautiful cross and Orthodox icon along the way, nestled in a covered shelter where the villagers would stop briefly for a prayer and a drink of water from the bucket and cup left fresh each day by the nearby community well.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2012

 

The silence punctuated by our huffs and puffs would be startled sometimes by a concealed voice coming from a person behind a fence covered in grape vines, saying hello or asking how we were doing. Maita was so proud when her neighbors would fawn over her visiting granddaughter.

After the landslide precipitated by melting snow and gliding layers of salt, Maita rebuilt a home next to her oldest son Nicolae in the middle of the village, conveniently close to the only store, the bus stop, the cemetery, and the village church.  From the front porch we could see the valley below shrouded in mist at dawn and filled with endless rows of grapevines and fruit trees. When the sun came up, the cold creek we bathed in each week sparkled like a jewel.

I stayed in this mud-brick home every summer. It was always cool and smelled of quince and autumn smoke. Maita cooked on a spit fire her famous chicken in the cast iron pot and tasty smoked beans when she was fasting. She had a large garden with plenty of vegetables to feed herself and her son’s large family next door.  A small opening in the fence allowed for quick passage to the two properties separated by a weathered fence.

Today the house is sadly abandoned. The heirs cannot agree on what to do with the property that nobody wants. The blue metal gate is in need of a new coat of paint and creaks in the wind when it opens. The rust spots match the grape leaves on the vines overhanging the walkway. I tread lightly, careful not to disturb the past. The porch is latched just as Maita and her son Ion used to do it. Her last child passed away last summer but his presence is still felt in the garden now overrun with weeds.

Maita's last house

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

I peer inside through a window. The furniture looks just like the furniture I grew up with in our home. He must have transferred it here from the city after my daddy passed away. I am looking for my grandma’s icon and garnet rosary that used to hang on the wall but it is missing, probably sold long time ago by uncle Ion.  A priceless work of art, the 19^th century rosary and icon must have fetched good money on the market. When we no longer care for history, even valuable prayer objects become disposable. Poor and suffering people in a collectivist society cannot afford to be sentimental.

Aunt Leana's grape vines

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

I walked up the mountain to visit aunt Leana’s surviving husband, uncle Stelian. After a long hike, I found their stucco home with the porch I used to play on as a child. Somehow the climb seemed much shorter but just as breathless and difficult, and the homes and plots of land much smaller than I had remembered them as a child.

Uncle Stelian in his yard

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

Stelian was in the yard, sitting on a makeshift stool, drinking his beloved homemade wine and prune brandy. We spoke through the same fence I recall from decades ago. He did not invite me in. Confused as if he’d seen a ghost from the past, it took him a while to remember me and my name. I snapped his photo through the wooden slats of the fence, wishing sadly that I could have seen aunt Leana once more. Her caring hands and sky-blue eyes have long left this earth. Her beautiful and devout Christian voice still echoes in the Orthodox Church by the cemetery.

Leana and Maita's water well

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

The shade cast by the grape vines above sheltered the courtyard from the hot sun just as I remembered it.  The smell of ripened quince, purple plums, and crushed grapes carried by a gentle breeze flooded my memory.  I returned to my world, thousands of miles away, with a painful and unexplainable regret and a feeling of permanent loss, taking a moment in time back with me, stuck on a memory card.

Symphony of White

Two of the strongest memories from my early childhood are the muddy yards and roads soaked into deep ruts by rivers of steady pouring rain and the pristine whiteness of the winter wonderland stillness when the dirt and mud are covered by a blanket of gleamingly white and fluffy snowflakes, blanketing snow glittering in the bitter and biting cold sunshine, accumulated and piled high above my head.

I could not imagine a prettier color than alpine white in the majestic Carpathian Mountains set in a wild and rocky terrain ringed with blue-green spruce.

Our snow at Christmas in grandpa’s yard was stained red with the splashed blood of the sacrificed pig raised to feed our entire extended family that otherwise would starve.

My memory brings back the red poppies in the fields of green and yellow wheat, guarded by a man armed with an axe; he meant business when he chased kids trampling government wheat in search of the bountiful and beautiful flowers that had more “useful purposes” to the guard’s communist bosses. The bright red was inviting us to pick them and take them to our moms to add a splash of color in the otherwise dreary and utilitarian grey space we called communist apartment homes. Picking wild flowers in a small bouquet was such an innocent delight which flooded my eyes with God’s beauty.

A sea of red hammer and sickle communist flags dominated the landscape when the population was forced out into the streets, rain or shine, to march in praise and glory to the dear leader and his wife.

Yellow and white were the fields of chamomile flowers we picked and dried to make tea, a soothing greenish liquid that relaxed us at night and helped clean infected wounds.

Our uniforms were plain shades of green, grey, brown, and navy. For a proper contrast, our school shirts were blue, freshened in the wash by hand with a cube of blue dye when they faded.  Hands would look blue for a while as we did not have latex gloves to shield the skin while doing laundry.  Girls as young as five were taught how to properly wash clothes.

Our hands would turn chocolate brown when it came time to pick and shell the green casing of walnuts which had not dried completely on its own. The purple plums we gathered for brandy and the juice we squeezed out of grapes in the fall to make wine stained our hands magenta.  

We cried crocodile tears when the pungent and juicy yellow onions had to be pulled by hand from the ground. We dug potatoes with a hoe and brown became embedded under fingernails for the duration no matter how much we washed our hands. The smell of fresh dirt and the worms we dug up with the potatoes was overwhelming. When it rains and the first drops fall on dry dirt, the smell reminds me of digging up potatoes from the soil which we then spread evenly on the floor of the cellar to dry up.

Grandma’s flower garden blossomed in summer and autumn with fragrant roses, dahlias, narcissus, tulips, chrysanthemums, lilacs, peonies, and lavender.  She was proud of her garden located close to the cast iron water pump that brought fresh ground water from the deep well. I helped by pumping enough water to nourish her precious blooms twice a week. Grandma and mom looked at the plants as God’s colorful gifts that filled the soul and eyes with beauty. The colorful and scented blooms were mom’s treasures.

Grandpa gave me a box of watercolors one year and, without consulting mom, I painted a small red rose on the wall by the couch where I slept. Each morning, when I first opened my eyes, I saw the rose.

We did not have any paintings or pictures on the wall except my parent’s oil portrait from their imaginary wedding. It was a fantasy wedding portrait as they were too poor to have a proper wedding and a formal dress. I wish I had that painting today! It had been long confiscated by God knows who.

Nature’s colors amazed me and I often dreamed that someday, when I could afford to, I would never wear anything else but bright colors, teal, pink, purple, lavender, grass green, magenta, orange, white, and reds.

I often wander in the woods to capture on camera nature’s palette. Fall is a symphony of yellows, browns, greens, and maroons that take my breath away. My husband laughs that I must have photographed the same trees for the last ten years but to me, each autumn brings another shade of color that I have not seen before with my naked eye. And the sun adds that little sparkle, a glint of gold, orange, pink, and cerulean blue streaking from the soft white clouds.

The fragrant green fir trees at Christmas and the tiny real candles we lit, the few glass ornaments, brought a warm glow of yellow light, joy and color to our otherwise drab existence.

One summer mom bought enough material for a new dress. It was not often that I got a new dress. Everything had to be altered, let out, let in, and hemmed to last several seasons. The print was small red roses with green leaves set in a black background. My seamstress aunt‘s masterful fingers created a work of art without a paper pattern. Every time I wore it, the splash of color made me feel special and I rode on a cloud of happiness all day, bathed in the hues of red and green.

My wardrobe today is an eclectic splash of cheerful and sunny colors. It’s not hard to find me in a crowded airport. To me, black is for somber occasions and funerals; navy is ceremonial; and brown is best served in dark chocolate.

The whiteness of snow is still so pristine that no garment can possibly match it. But I wear white long after Labor Day, a bright spot in a crowd of winter.

Late Summer Rain Brings More Memories

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015
Water pump installed long before
I was born

The hot summer has been suddenly replaced by a cold-driving fall rain. The water is soaking steadily into the parched dirt. There is a hurricane on its way, disguising its ugly wrath under a flowery name, Florence. Nature can use the rain but not the wrath and destruction of this massive swirling giant, picking up speed in the Atlantic and moving towards the Carolinas.

We gave up watering the dry lawn a few weeks ago as the grass turned brown from the oppressively humid heat. It rained a lot earlier in the summer but then it stopped.

Wild animals, deer, rabbits, coyotes, and raccoons were coming closer and closer to the front door, looking for fresh water. I filled the three bird baths daily but the water was always gone. Deer trampled the flower beds searching for water and fresh green grass. Why this water tasted better than the pond or the river nearby, I would never understand.

On days like this, my memory takes me to my grandma’s clay dirt and straw brick house with its tiny windows. When it rained, the interior became quite dark so I sought the outdoors under the large awning over a concrete patio. I enjoyed sitting and watching the rain fall, turning the grassless yard into a sloshy landscape with tiny rivers dug into the mud. The yard birds chirped and the pig squealed with joy. Thunder in the distance broke the domestic tranquility and lightning cracked an invisible whip in the sky.

I was too young to know or understand why grandpa never graveled the yard, installed pavers for a pathway, or planted sturdy grass that we could walk on without sinking into deep mud. Grandma’s rubber boots helped if they did not get sucked in and stuck ankle deep with a grip so powerful, no pulling could disentangle the vice like hold of the mud. He probably could not afford pavers or gravel, raising six children even in the country was not easy.

I was just happy to be with him, to ask questions to which he always had a fascinating answer. Grandpa was a self-taught man who loved books. He instilled in me the love of reading, exploring, and asking questions of scholarly men from whom I learned so much.

He always brought out the few copies of National Geographic which a team of American archeologists had left behind when they finished their summer Roman digs at the edge of the village. They stayed with grandpa as he had a beautiful and fully furnished brick home that was never used by family unless his youngest son visited from the city 60 km away. He unlocked this magical house for him and I would sneak in and play with his Roman coin collection or grandma’s shoes and purse from her dowry trunk. As was the case with everyone, his brick home did not have running water or a sewer system. The outhouse was in the back and the cast iron water pump was in the middle of the yard.

The rest of the year, grandpa and grandma lived and slept in the tiny two-bedroom mud and straw brick house with the kitchen at the other end and a generous loft where he kept hay, dry corn, and wheat from that year’s harvest, along with armies of mice and numerous flee-infested cats who kept the mice population under control.

The peasants were lucky to get electricity in the early 1970s even though the village was located only 9 km from a very large industrial town. Before then, the oil lamps were the only form of light at night. No street lamps either, just the starry nights, darkness, and scary stories sitting with the neighbors outside the gate on the wooden bench, specially made for this purpose, for chatting with neighbors and catching up on the village news and gossip.

People lived so close to each other and crowded, separated only by a wooden fence, with no land in between homes. It was impossible not to know everybody else’s business. The rest of the land was used for personal gardening and for Communist Party’s collective farms.

Bolsheviks were U.N. Agenda 21/2030 compliant long before the globalists of today decided to install worldwide communism and force people off their private property into high-rise, mixed-use buildings in the city under the guise of Green Growth, Sustainability for the sake of environmental protection - such an easy way to control the dumbed-down and crowded population.

Grandpa commuted to work 18 km round-trip for over 40 years on his bicycle, rain or shine, even in the snow. He could not afford the rickety communist bus that ran twice a day to and from the city and riding for free in the open cargo area of a large factory truck like cattle was out of the question.

Today’s globalists are attempting to remove us from our cars and force everyone into public transportation and bikes. They are even going to tax bike users on the many expensive bike paths that are being built around the country in a mad rush to socially engineer everything we do because, if it worked so well for communist China and socialist Europe, it must be good for us too.

At least the Soviets pretended to care for agriculture, for the food supply of the people. They forcibly confiscated their property and moved them off the land into crowded villages in order to form their collective farms on the joined land where everybody worked and, regardless of effort applied, got an even portion at harvest time, while the commies took their lion’s share first.

Some of the villagers worked harder than others but they shared the harvest equally. Humans are not so altruistic that they would put forth effort for others indefinitely. Pretty soon everyone slacked off.  There was no incentive to work harder. The factory communist motto, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” eventually stretched to farming as well and fields remained unproductive and full of weeds. Such was socialism, it bred laziness - everyone became dependent on the omnipotent government who doled out crumbs.