We took a bike ride this morning.
In the evening, the Boy went for a sleepover, the Girl was at work.
We went out for dinner.
Saturday
cycling
New Bike
We finally got K a mountain bike so she can actually ride with E and me on trails. It took a while to get the seat just right...
Sunday Here and There
Spring 2024 Tournament Day 2
Today was the final day of our short spring tournament. They boys played their hearts out, and they had a good time -- the results (0-1-2) weren't as important.
It was a bittersweet afternoon, though: it will be the last season this team is together. There are always some new members each season, but this team has had a little core for the last three seasons, and now it's all over. Several of the boys (E included) will be too old to play on the fall team, and the coach won't be working with U12s anymore: he's moving up to the 18s travel team.
Coach M was a great coach, the only coach the Boy really wanted to play for, and we're going to miss him.
In the evening, we went on our first ride of the season.
Except for L: she doesn't like cycling, which is a shame.
Family Ride
It's been a while since K joined E and me on a bike ride. (What about L? When it comes to cycling, forget about L: biking is not her thing anymore, and we're not going to try to force that on her. )
We headed south to Hickory Knob State Park, which has a six-mile bike trail that winds along beside a lake. Only 300 feet of climbing, so it seemed like something K would be comfortable with. After all, she's on a suspension-less hybrid bike with 32mm tires: it's not going to do well at a lot of the places E and I like.
We got started, took a few pictures along the way, found a turtle in the middle of the trail (rescued it), rounded a bend in the trail to discover huge, dark clouds just a few hundred feet from us.
We knew it might start raining: it was in the forecast. But we hoped it might hold out, that we might survive with a few sprinkles.
Within a few minutes, it wasn't sprinkling; it wasn't raining; it was a monsoon.
What else could we do except continue pedaling?
Out of Shape
Starting to ride to work more. Those morning rides are usually fine -- slow, but lovely. Afternoon, though....
First Day Out
We had our first day out on mountain bikes today. It was a beautiful spring day with temperatures in the sixties.
It had rained a bit yesterday, so the trails were a bit muddy at times, but nothing too awful.
Overall, we did 11.59km.
Bike Ride to Bory
Ride and Visit
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
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.
One of the first changes we'd noticed was that the shortcut is no more.
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.
