Matching Tracksuits

polska 2015

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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

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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.

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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.

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

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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).

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Drain, Rain, and a Snail

Saturday 20 June 2015

Our crawl space flooded at least five times in the last couple of years, and our half-basement itself flooded once or twice as well. It quickly became clear what was the cause: two downspouts of our gutters were gushing water straight into the foundation, which meant that our drainage system (already redone twice) was insufficient, clogged with roots, dirt, and who knows what. So earlier this year, I replaced the system with a temporary fix. An ugly fix. But it solved the problem. I knew I’d have to do it for a second time (the first time was done by a contractor before we moved in, part of our closing deal), but I as in no hurry.

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“Your number one priority while we’re in Poland,” K clarified, though, “is to redo the drains in the front.” So for the last few days, I’ve been digging, tugging, leveling, and getting everything ready for a final fix. I knew it’d be overkill, but I also figured I’d rather not do it another time, so the replacement system is with three-inch schedule 40 PVC pipe. But before I could get everything set, the sky began to gray, and I decided I might need to reattach the old temporary system, just in case.

What followed was a storm unlike anything I’d seen here. “It would have been the perfect test,” I muttered to myself.

Yesterday and today, though, I was able to get back out, finish up the leveling, and finish up the project, by and large. I decided to include two clean-outs in the plan just in case: I do not want to do this yet again. I reattached the hose to the spigot, rammed it down it not the newly constructed system, and turned it on. Perfection.

“Now if I could only get a real test,” I thought. Wish granted: another storm blew through this afternoon and everything worked like a charm. All that’s left is packing a bit more gravel around it and replacing the mulch.

Job one, done. More or less.

But who cares about drains and rain when across the ocean there are snails and soccer games?

K took the kids and Babcia to visit A, K’s sister-in-law, and their kids, who live just outside of Krakow. There was soccer and silliness until L discovered a snail — “na prawda duzy slimak!” K assured me (though probably with better grammar) before I’d had a chance to see the pictures — and that entertained them for a couple of hours.

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L has fallen back into Polish with no problem, K tells me. In fact, she’s eager to accompany her cousin S for a two-week camp up at the coast. The Boy, though, is a different story. Though K speaks almost exclusively in Polish, he’s still not really speaking that much Polish. I would imagine he feels a little left out as a result. “I translate for him a lot,” L explained today during our Skype time, but there’s something about this picture, his hands held in front of him as he watches, that makes me just want to hug him and assure him that he’ll be able to jabber away in no time as long as he makes a real effort. Or maybe there’s something else entirely going on with that picture. Maybe he’s just hungry, ready to head to the kitchen for some chicken and potatoes.

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Or maybe not.

First Pics from Abroad

Friday 19 June 2015

“How will I send you pictures?” K asked before leaving with the kids to Poland. We worked out a couple of different ways, but uploading directly to MTS seems to be the best method.

And so now I begin the shift from blogger to historian, for I’m writing about pictures and events where I was absent. I can look at the pictures, make an educated guess about what was going on (informed by what K told me via Skype), but by and large, I’m still just a historian.

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So I look at the pictures and think, “Hum, at the airport.” And I think further: Charlotte or Munich? It doesn’t look like the terminal from which we’ve always left from Charlotte, but it looks less like the Munich airport. Still, the carpet, the handicap sign (why are my children sitting in a seat for handicapped people?), the general surroundings, the alertness of the kids — it must be Charlotte.

The other pictures are easy: I recognize the spot immediately, and more importantly, K told me about their shopping trip to “downtown” Jabłonka.

The clothes are another clue: Charlotte was 98° when they left; Poland was in the 50s, with the 5 AM morning temperature (Babcia is an early-riser) being a refreshing 32° F. Still, you’ll notice in L’s hand an ice cream cone. Apparently they’re continuing the tradition we started in 2013: if you go to the village centrum, you must get an ice cream cone. Still, you’ll also notice in the background that children returning from school are wearing shorts. It is, after all, June. Summer in Poland.

Here and There

Thursday 18 June 2015

Two stories, one family. Or maybe one family, one story, temporarily told in two parts. The highlight of the day came in the morning, without question. Mug of coffee in hand, I headed downstairs to chat with the better portion of our family. They’re finishing up lunch; I just had breakfast.

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The Boy began with the important information: new additions to the toy collection. With money from Babcia, he bought an entire set of air-travel-based toys: airplane, cargo lifter, the stair-mobile that we occasionally see but almost never use. Except at Krakow’s airport.

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He put a couple of toys down in front of the computer and proclaimed that I could play with those. I suggested we might have to wait until the family is reunited.

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In the meantime, the Girl has dashed up to her room (which means bolting up four sets of stairs) and back to show me what she chose with her money from Babcia: a small Nerf-launching pistol to go along with her Nerf-launching bow that’s still here, in South Carolina.

It’s likely to be a daily or near-daily occurrence. “What kind of plastic nonsense will she have next Wednesday, when you guys go to the flea market?” I ask. L just jumped in joyful anticipation.

Feed the Cats!

Tuesday 16 June 2015

K and the kids are now somewhere over the Atlantic, on their way to Munich, where they’ll have ninety minutes to make a connection to Krakow, where K’s godfather will pick them up and drive them two hours south almost into Slovakia, where Babcia is waiting with chicken broth and homemade egg noodles. The ninety-minute ride to the airport went fine, the check-in process was flawless, and we even had time to sit and share an over-priced bottle of orange juice before they entered the terminal area restricted to those of us who lack a ticket. I wound through the line with them, ducking out at the last minute just before K and the kids had to take off shoes, belts, etc. The Boy came back over to the rope barrier and gave me another hug and kiss. The Girl followed, on the brink of tears, reminding me for the thousandth time to…