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polska 2022

Last night

Friday 16 February 2024

An unpublished entry from the end of our 2022 visit to Poland.

The Boy’s stuff is spread throughout the house: toys on the living room, play money in the kitchen, shoes in a variety of locations. My stuff is spread just as widely. So much to remember tomorrow. I’ve got to clean and cover the fire pit in the gazebo. I’ve got to bring two bikes upstairs, remembering to take the pedals off my bike to take back to the States but remember to leave the shoes for next time.

ANd I sit here wondering if I’ve done all I could have here. Have I rolled in nostalgia enough?” Is another way to put it. I met almost no one from my side here—few former students (always a joy) and no former colleagues. It’s the first time that’s ever happened. We often come back just before the end of the Polish school year, and I simply have to drop in at my former school to meet a lot of people. This year, we didn’t arrive until a week or more after the year was over, so it was only a matter of chance whether or not I met anyone.

I did get to meet with my absolute best friend here, which I was unable to accomplish during our last visit in 2017. I’m not even sure if we got to meet in 2015. Still, we had a chance to sit around drinking beer and talking about nonsense like old times. Sort of. E was with me; neither of us touch cigarettes anymore; we didn’t listen to any music (no exclamations about the perfection of the coming guitar solo); it was in the afternoon in the gazebo he built on his parents’ property during his Covid lockdown. “I had to do something” he explained.

Again wallowing in nostalgia, I guess. Looking for the joy of repetition, even in the small things.

“And it doesn’t come back, but I’ll be looking all of my life.”

Changes

Monday 27 March 2023

Changes are visible every time we head back to Poland. This summer was no exception, but I didn’t notice a significant change until long after we returned.

At the corner of the rynek in Nowy Targ stood a strange building that seemed more like a house that had been renovated into a business. It always stood out.

2013

What I didn’t notice in the summer of 2022 (and thus did not photograph, relying instead now on Google Street View) was that the entire building has been completely renovated.

2021

And yet I recall looking at the bank to the left, the bank I visited countless times, and thinking that something just didn’t look right.

Before and After

Monday 9 January 2023

Lightroom’s “Content-Aware Fill” function is improving…

Before

After

Babcia Re-edits

Saturday 6 August 2022

I’ve been re-editing some pictures from Poland here and there, and I decided to throw together a little compositive of our favorite picture of Babcia, adding some falling leaves and sun rays.

And because Babcia always talks longingly of living 100-200 years ago instead of today with all these crazy computers, I decided to turn it into an old picture as well.

Auschwitz Edits

Wednesday 3 August 2022

I edited a few pictures I took in Poland which required more attention than I could give them on a small-screen laptop with only a trackpad. Today I focused on the few pictures I took at Auschwitz.

Return

Tuesday 2 August 2022

Five years ago, I came back a little later with the kids. On our departure day, we found a nice place to sit and wait in Krakow airport.

Today, we recreated the picture — sort of:

We made it home, though, safely and relatively painlessly.

And so our Polska 2022 adventure is over. Reflection to follow, but I’ve been up now for 27 hours, so I’m going to bed…

Last Day in Jablonka 2022

Sunday 31 July 2022

Here in Jablonka, we began our last day with rain and temperature keeping us indoors. It never rose above the high-50s, and it rained all morning before taking a short lunch break to prepare for an afternoon and evening of rain. Depressing weather to go with a day of mixed feelings: ready to go home, we’re both a little sad to leave the adventure here.

In the meantime, K flew out of our local airport heading to Newark for a funeral. In New York, it was sunny and lovely, and K got to see a friend she hadn’t seen for years. Still, the motivation for the trip was a tragedy. A mixture as here.

With the weather as it was, we had few choices this last day in Jablonka. We watched some television, talked, packed — and repeated it all.

And for dinner: kiszka heated on the stove Babcia uses for hot water.

Random Bit for Future Smiles

A regular during our stay here was was the Magno-Z commercial: we got to see that a few times during our month here. The Boy groaned each time it came on, but he still sang along with it.

Commercials, it turns out, are a great source for learning a language.

Family Ognisko

Friday 29 July 2022

One of the things that must happen during a trip to Polska (from the point of view of our children anyway) is an ognisko in Spytkowice. We tried three times this visit — three weekends — and got rained out each time.

It looked like this time we’d get rained out as well, so we did the simple and obvious thing: moved the ognisko to Jablonka, where there’s a covered gazebo. Problem solved. Ognisko complete.

0% “beer” is all the rage now

Last Market Day

Wednesday 27 July 2022

Today was the last day at the jarmark for us. To be honest, I could have done without: there’s very little I’m willing to buy there, but I’m always willing to snap a few pictures with my phone, which is so much less obtrusive than walking around with a camera.

The Boy finally made a decision: he did indeed buy a knife. He’s been worried about whether or not it would make it on the plane, and my assurances that it would be fine as long as it was in our checked luggage finally convinced him. The actual selection process was typical: he handled this one, opened that one, examined a third, went back to the first when a fourth caught his eye.

In the afternoon, we went another bike ride. This time I took him through the forest before heading up along, mixed-surface climb that he declared at the end to be the hardest climb he’s ever done.

Finally, in the evening, I headed back to Lipnica Wielka on a solo ride with the intention of riding to the base of Babia, then crossing over to Lipnica Mala to come back down. However, I made it halfway through LW before I realized it was foolishness to think I could make that ride: I know the climbs that awaited, and I knew my legs didn’t have it in them.

Of course, I stopped by one more time to see how dom nauczyciela was going: it is, in a word, gone. Nothing remains but a hole where the basement was.

Ride and Visit

Tuesday 26 July 2022

The forecast called for rain by lunchtime, so the Boy and I decided to get a morning ride in before the predicted afternoon of rain. We headed out toward the area of the village known as “Wild,” but we came back along tractor tracts and dirt roads through fields.

One of the oddities of riding in rural Poland is the “Warning: Cows with Square Udders Ahead” sign. It has also given rise to a new danger for E as a cyclist: the unexpected blobs of cow blessings on the road.

Along the way back, we discovered yet more abandoned houses, but different in a significant way: these are not unfinished houses that the owners abandoned to move to the States. These are lived-in, likely-loved houses that have simply outlived their usefulness. To renovate them makes little sense to the owners: they’re too small, and to renovate them would cost more than just building a new house.

In the afternoon, once it was raining and rather cold, we headed over to the aunties’ house for name day celebrations. In loving yet typical Polish fashion, the aunties served a virtual meal even though Babcia had begged them not to. It wasn’t a formal meal. It was just enough snacks and cakes to make a meal.

Changes and Endings

Monday 25 July 2022

There was a shortcut through an empty field by a neighbor’s house that was worn down with years of use. The Girl used it heading to her first day at Polish school nine years ago.

First Day at (Polish) School

One of the first changes we’d noticed was that the shortcut is no more.

The shortcut

More and more people drive more and more. Fewer people walk. Just like fewer and fewer people have anything resembling a farm.

“The Polish village is dying,” Babcia insists. “It survived the Partitions, the wars, Communism — but capitalism killed it.” When she says this, I want to argue that it’s more complicated than that, but I never do. What’s the point?

This afternoon, we decided to go for a bike ride to Lipnica Wielka, my home for seven years. Along the way, we passed a monument to slain Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Germans in 1945 as the Soviets pushed the Germans back. The front shifted, as it always does, but from Christmas 1944 to Easter 1945, it ran right through this area.

There’s a monument to the men who died here, presumably at a mass grave based on the inscription.

While the Russians were certainly not heroes in the strictest sense (they were raping in mass numbers as they went along, particularly when they crossed into Germany), they were freeing the Poles from a greater immediate threat. Or were they? Didn’t they just replace one type of totalitarian rule with another? Was it really that much of a change? The Germans had Auschwitz; the Soviets had the Gulag Archipelago.

Things changed, but they didn’t.

When we reached Centrum, I decided we should go look at dom nauczyciela one more time. I knew how it would look — just as it had always looked.

It was scheduled for demolition, but I knew that would take weeks. Months. Maybe even a year. When it comes to construction, nothing moves fast in Poland.

As we approached, though, I saw that the road to dom nauczyciela had been partially blocked off.

And soon, I heard the machinery. And I knew. I knew that although nothing in construction moves fast in Poland, destruction can come with unexpected rapidity.

There it was, my home for three years, three of the most amazing years of my youth, being carted away, load by load, in a dump truck.

It’s silly to feel sentimental about a building, to exaggerate the importance of a relatively routine action. “Things move on,” K suggested in a text.

The building was ugly — there was no denying that. It’s not like it had all the charm of a solution to a problem in which only functionality played any role at all. The strange roof that cascaded and became part of the side of the building suggests at least a half-hearted attempt to make the building original, in some sense beautiful. But like so many things built when communism and socialist realism ruled behind the Iron Curtain, the attempt at some kind of architectural uniqueness only highlighted everything wrong with the ideas ruling the country. The building was, in a word, ugly.

In addition, it was likely horridly inefficient at keeping the heat in. When the mayor’s assistant (who later went on to become the mayor himself) moved into the apartment beside mine on the first floor, he added insulation to the outside of the building to help with the frigid winter nights. The water for the heaters circulated in a clockwise motion from the lower left corner where the boiler was located. I got the hot water first, and as a result, my apartment was almost always oppressively hot when it was in the minus twenties outside. But by the time the water got to the mayor’s assistant’s apartment, it had cooled considerably, hence the insulation.

So K was right: it was time for the poorly insulated, ugly building to come down. But that reality doesn’t change the stab I felt as I watched workers clean up what was left of the building.

Oddly enough, just a few meters from my former home as one heads to the back of the school

is a home that has never changed in appearance since I arrived in 1996, a home that has never been inhabited.

The owners moved to America and quite possibly have even passed away by now. Their children, fully integrated Americans with no desire to return to a small village in southern Poland, a village that one only drives to and never through, own property that they likely never see.

The ride itself — the before and after the discovery — was fantastic:

a 25 km ride that the Boy handled like a pro.