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Month: June 2015

Nowy Targ Afternoon

Tuesday 30 June 2015

Every time we go to Poland, we do the same things -- and I make that observation. Yet Poland is changing, growing. It's got one of the strongest economies in Europe now, and when that simple fact is coupled with additional funds that come from the EU, it's easy to understand why. Yet this is the second day that I look at the pictures and say, "Where in the world is that?" I know where it is: K told me in an email what they did today, and I knew about the afternoon visit long before. But the first part? They're in Nowy Targ, but where in the world is this park?

I do see one thing that's not a mystery: the Boy being a gentleman, helping a young friend -- dare we say a cousin? After all, K and D are as close to sisters as you might possibly be without an actual genetic bond.

It's easy to identify the location of the second batch of pictures: the rynek in Nowy Targ. Yet had I not known about the renovations, I never would have guessed it. Until I saw the ice cream: NT has a little hole in the wall with the best ice cream on the planet.

Finally, at the end, familiar faces, familiar location.

Babcia’s Day

Monday 29 June 2015

Not having a driver’s license, Babcia is not able to go where she wills when she wills. For the last few days, K has been taking the lead, I believe, more or less deciding on the agenda. Today was Babcia’s day.

She wanted to visit a friend. Where? I can’t recall, and the area doesn’t really look familiar at all. There’s a restaurant — karczma it would be called — that looks like a place near Spytkowice, but I don’t think Spytkowice has apartment blocks like that.

So odd to be looking at your own family’s pictures but not really knowing much more than a stranger at times.

Playgrounds don’t tell you much, but the architecture of the wooden buildings shows that it’s still in the general area K grew up, still in the mountains.

Perhaps you should ask K.

Ząb 2015

Sunday 28 June 2015

Odpust 2015

Saturday 27 June 2015

Because almost every village is its own parish, almost every village has an odpust. During the last trip to Poland, we were in Pyzówka for their odpust. We were there strictly as visitors, as observers.

Today, however, the Girl got to participate in Jabłonka’s odpust, as did K.

“I cleaned the church!” K told me, relating her part of the experience. The excitement came from the fact that she cleaned the altar, dusting and wiping down all the statuary that’s part of Jabłonka’s main church’s impressive altar piece. It’s something she’d looked at all her life growing up, so I guess seeing it all so up close, from a different perspective both literally and figuratively, was certainly exciting.

L’s part, though was as visible as K’s was behind-the-scenes: she was helped lead the procession to the church, sprinkling flowers before the priests and dignified guests as they processed. The whole experience must certainly be novel to the Girl, for even though we’re members of a vibrant and active parish here in Greenville, there’s not a lot of processing going on, not of this nature. And besides, how would everyone treat that?

In Jabłonka — and elsewhere in Poland — everyone treats it as such a special occasion that all the traditional garb comes out and it becomes a visually lovely experience. In America, everyone would come out in shorts and flipflops because in the summer, that’s about as close as we come to traditional garb. It’s one of the disadvantages of living in such a relatively young country that has, for generations, been much more mobile than the Old Country. We mix and match and before you know it, any sense of tradition that stretches back into the mists of memory have disappeared. The only people that hold to that are the Native Americans (who often have to fight on onslaught of competing cultures that see themselves as somehow extensions of that very culture) and the minority populations, Asian, South American, and to some degree African. It’s a sad thing, but perhaps somewhat unavoidable, given our history and our lack of homogeneity.

But Poland, especially in the rural areas of the mountains, really exemplifies homogeneity. It was something that took some getting used to when I first moved to Lipnica Wielka, which is just about seven or eight kilometers from K’s home village of Jabłonka. Everywhere I looked I saw homogeneity: white people speaking a single language. When, on a trip to Warsaw, I saw African students in the the main train station, I almost wanted to hug them and say, “Let me just look at you! It’s so refreshing to see some diversity again!” When I saw a young Asian girl and a black girl on a popular TV series, both speaking flawless Polish, I became enthralled, wanting to learn everything I could about them. Heterogeneity was so rare that I just gawked at it.

That was the Poland of the latter mid-90s. Twenty years on, so much has changed. Emigration from Poland has increased with the open EU borders, creating a certain brain drain as many of the more educated young adults move west, and immigration from the east, often illegal, has increased as well, as people from the former Soviet republics move to their own West, which is now Poland. And about all that, I have mixed feelings. I know that Poland will never become America, ethnically speaking, but might it become Germany? France? Diversity is a wonderful thing, but as with everything, it comes with a certain price. Still, I don’t see the highlanders of southern Poland diluting their own culture and pride in it at all for anyone.

Not that I’m suggesting anyone would try to dilute it — it’s just a byproduct, I think, of competing cultures. Not so for the gorals of the south: they’d cling to it ferociously, ever more mindful of the competition. And to some degree, that competition, with the level playing field that the Internet creates, already exists.

Back to the story: after odpust, everyone went to aunty’s for dinner. And it was a huge feast, in keeping with the Polish saying, “A guest in the house is God in the house.” And even though they’re family, K and the kids are still guests, and the Polish spirit demands sharing on a massive scale.

L hit it off with K’s cousin, R, who is a technophile as L is becoming. She loves showing people how to play this game or that game on the family tablet, which, truth be told, is more hers than anyone else’s.

When L and I were there two years ago, we attended R’s and M’s wedding — our daughter’s first experience with a Polish wedding. As a girl who loves — absolutely loves — dancing, she was hooked immediately.

There’s another family wedding coming up in mid-July, one which I’m hoping to attend myself. Still no decision yet: the to-do list still has a lot to get done, but maybe. Hopefully.

Exploration

Friday 26 June 2015

K and the kids went to the small town nearby where L and S, her cousin, might go to a day camp in the next couple of weeks.

And that's all I know about that.

Basement

Thursday 25 June 2015

Step one: take almost everything from one side of the basement and put it on the other side. Cram everything in as much as possible — make it look like a complete wreck.

Step two: clean and paint the now-clean side of the basement with waterproofing paint to ~~reduce~~ eliminate the risk of future flooding. (This should be done in conjunction with a complete renovation of the gutters’ drainage system.)

Step three: move everything else out of the basement storage room into only other room in the basement. Pack it all as ridiculously tightly as possible.

Step five (the previous one counts as two steps): clean the other half of the basement storage room floor

Step six: dread reversing all the steps.

A Break in the Clouds

Wednesday 24 June 2015

Click on a picture for a larger version.

96 – 48

Tuesday 23 June 2015

There was an almost fifty-degree temperature difference between Jabłonka and Greenville this third day of the 2015 summer. There, it was raining all day; here, the sun was merciless. That being said, we all had the same reaction: stay in as much as possible.

Aunty came by for a visit -- she lives just about a mile away, so it's convenient, and visiting is just what you do when it's forty-eight degrees and raining in June.

K told me that she "couldn't put enough layers on today." But being trapped indoors leads to discoveries: "We played a couple of games of battleship, and then we discovered the Qwirkle game upstairs in the wooden room. It is a great game, I think we will play it a lot when the rest of the kids join."

That will be next week, when Polish schools are done for the year and the cousins come to grandma's.

On this side of the ocean, I spent the day cleaning out one half of the basement in preparation for a thick, heavy coat of water-sealing paint. "Withstands up to 15 PSI" proclaims the label. Sounds like you could submerge your house in that case. Still, it was a job that required a lot of work that doesn't leave a lot to show for it. The before and after pictures look almost the same. A little less dirt on the floor, and some patches where I scraped up the old paint entirely.

In theory, this is unnecessary: I've discovered the source of our occasional flooding (poorly clogged drainage that leaves the downspouts to pour water along the house), and I've fixed the problem. In theory. But I'm not about to take a chance, so I have plans to paint both the basement walls and floor as well as the portion of the crawlspace where water was likely entering.

But it wasn't all inside work today. I worked in our small garden, finishing pulling up the old peas, straightening some of the tomato stakes, and dreaming of the not-too-distant future when I'm overwhelmed with tomatoes.

Bonfires, Walks, and a Jet

Monday 22 June 2015

I make a pile of the junk found in the basement today as I cleaned: broken hoe handles, bird feeders that had seen their last winter so long ago that I can’t even remember using them, spare wood that I’ve been saving — triangles, short pieces, long half broken pieces, even two broken pool cues well over a year after we gave away our pool table on Craigslist, a pizza box a little over a week old that had been sitting in a refrigerator that entire time holding bits of Howie’s bread that I’ve been nibbling on here and there. A pile of trash collected through the day will soon be nothing bad nothing but ash.

Ordinarily I would be a bit worried about starting a fire this late in a South Carolina June. Usually the grass is brutally brittle by now and brown, but back to back monsoons have thoroughly soaked the ground so that the grass looks like it’s early May, and there should be no danger. Still I keep the hose pipe next to me just in case a stray ember ignites a small patch of grass light or, perhaps worse, a concerned neighbor (read: worried; read: nosey?) calls the authorities. “Yes officer, I have a means to extinguish the fire immediately right beside me. No, officer I do not have a permit.”

It’s probably appropriate that today of all days I have set a fire a bonfire in our backyard, for today Kinga and the kids went for a walk down to the small river that runs through Jablonka, near which teens for decades burned bonfires legally (possibly) and down vodka illegally. When we still lived in Poland, K and I took numerous walks to that same spot. I took my parents to that spot when they came in 2004 for our wedding. I took L to that spot several times when we spent the summer there together in 2013. It’s about a mile from her house, maybe more, but it always seems both shorter order and longer, a path through fields of potatoes, beets, cabbage, grass for livestock. It’s comfortably known, that walk, and it’s always one of the very first things we do when we go back

Bonfire always makes you think all is well with the world. They’re so calming, so simple, so primitive, so hypnotic. Just sitting looking at the fire (and if you’re lucky enough to hear the crickets around you) seems to square everything in the world. Even if you’re an adult who never really experienced bonfires as a child, it still seems to bring about a rebirth of youth, If you’re with friends, conversation always leave early always meaningful and always nostalgic; if you’re alone, you feel as if you’re the only person on Earth. You can hear cars passing in the distance, your neighbors chatting on their back porch, but you’re still alone in the world.

I sit in the backyard at our fire thinking of my family in Poland as I hear a jet fly overhead, approaching the regional airport some 15 miles away. I miss them terribly, and our daily Skype chat is a small little blessing. Yet I’m strangely content because because I know that, like the bonfire, the separation is only temporary. And that’s really the trick to getting on in the world contentedly: understanding that so much of it is temporary and making your peace with that simple fact.

Cold Sunday

Sunday 21 June 2015

The Boy likes to help. It's a common theme here: he helps me mow, he helps us with the garden, he helps us in the kitchen. He just follows along behind and asks, "Can I help?" not expecting any answer other than the affirmative.

And we rarely say, "No." Occasionally, we might be in a hurry and so we compromise: "How about you help clean up?"

Babcia, of course, is never going to say, "No." But I wonder how this situation came about. Did she ask him if he wants to help grind -- what is that? liver? are they working on pate? -- or did he manage, "Babcia, moge pomoc?"

The rest of the pictures seem self-explanatory enough. A festival during a cold Sunday when temperatures were almost in the single digits (Centigrade, of course).