Tell Me About Yours

I grew up hearing snippets about the old country, good Balkan land where my grandparents sprouted and bloomed. Families slept pressed together under rug-like coverlets to ward off frigid winters in a time before central heating. Those heavy blankets were called levanskas. Their yarns were sourced from the wool of the family’s own sheep, fibers handspun and dyed in traditional Squip (Albanian) colors—black and red and ivory. I have one in storage in the basement—linted with meaning, too rough and scratchy to use.

I remember being told my maternal great-grandmother was the healer back in her home village of Boboshtica. She had a sly grin and carried chestnuts in her pockets for the children. Is this true? I’ve no way to know for sure—those that may have heard accounts firsthand left their bodies years ago. I’ve carried that story for so long—what’s another decade or two? I have some chestnuts in a little box somewhere. I’ve a vague notion my mother gave them to me and they are somehow connected to this great-grandmother I never knew. There are far worse legacies, I suppose.

What is fact from a time and place where people didn’t write these things down? Family history is knit from oral tradition and memories, each generation one row further removed from the lives of our forebears. What does the middle of the blanket know of the first purls?

The old country. Do we all have stories from there?

If I had grandchildren I could tell them of my own old country, a place where kids roamed free. Back there, time rolled out in long, languid afternoons and entire summers spent exploring the woods and befriending the sprites who made homes there. I created patchworked moss gardens and fairy houses at the base of oaks and pines. My witch’s brews were muddy mixtures of water and pebbly bottom soil from the little creek that wound through forested land. I stick-stirred these concoctions in an old iron pot hung from a stick propped in the branches of two neighboring trees. Swept my makeshift cottage bare of leaves with a branch that triple-forked at one end.

My old country was richly hued—so many shades of green laced with aubergine and vermilion. The flora rose from soil of umbers, burnt and raw and grown fertile under blankets of ochre pine needles. This in contrast to all the gray that coats computers and cell phones and buildings and people in these times. And the cars! Achromatic fleets of dull ashy autos crammed onto roads that sometimes audibly groan at the weight of them.

I’m smiling a little now, poking gentle fun at my nostalgia. My old country colors do grow more luminous as I amble closer to death.

Is it always this way? Do we all spin gold from our childhoods even if there was nothing particularly shiny to be found there?

There’s plenty of evidence pointing toward  the notion that things truly are more complicated, less beautiful, more fraught as we wake up in year after year of 24/7 news cycles smacking us in the face. All these shootings, wars small and large, foreign and domestic. All this animosity and rage.

Those that use our human-ness as fodder for their own power plays seem to count on our fear and outrage rendering us too numb to respond.

Truth: We still have forests and streams and ponds. I attest that dawn birdsong can exfoliate traces of sleep and cynicism. Shapeshifting clouds still sail through on breezes we cannot touch. Sprites still duck under fallen trees as we pass through. Poems keep unfurling towards the light. The present is loaded with wisdom—some quiet, some making a glorious ruckus that would rival the soundtracks of Broadway musicals.

I think—I choose to think— the afterlife must return us to a sort of childhood. So much of that time seemed spacious and simple, lovely and free.

What does your old country look and sound smell like? I’ll make us some hot tea while you pull up a chair. I’d love to hear your story.

–Melinda

 

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash