Old World, Revisit

As I reread this post, which I first published back in August, I thought about how it’s really about place and the lives that can grow out of deep roots developed over time. The loss of war is often counted in casualties, which is tragic, but displacement is tragic as well.

Note: Anthony’s family is mostly in western Ukraine and doing okay over there. We hope everything will continue to be okay.

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The market — which sells black currants and tomatoes and porcini mushrooms by the bucket — is only closed one day a week, making it the inverse of a farmer’s market back home. I’m at my partner’s family’s place in western Ukraine, our first trip here in two years because of the pandemic. We stay in their four-room apartment, which is small but has the most perfect balcony in the world, and leave primarily to walk the dog or go to the market. I don’t speak Ukrainian or Russian so I trail behind on these outings, carrying bags and observing everything around me. The men and women (mostly women) sit at covered stalls if they’ve paid for it or on tiny stools with their wares spread out on blankets if they haven’t. There aren’t so many rules about what’s sold here. It’s not only local — you see bananas and Turkish figs — but most of it is. The berries are tiny, the eggs are smeared with feathers and the women will tell you about the quality of their farmers cheese that day versus last week. Many of them have far fewer things to sell than the small businesses at my farmer’s market. We buy out all their berries or eggs and then they go home.

The food we make from all this richness tends toward simple: a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, shredded carrot, raw onion, garlic, parsley and a touch of sunflower oil and salt, just enough to draw some water from the vegetables into a flavorful juice that pools at the bottom of the bowl. Broth soups made with beans you can actually taste. Crepes filled with farmers cheese and eaten with smetana (sour cream, but better) and homemade sour cherry preserves. Okroshka, a cold soup of thinly sliced cucumbers, radishes, potatoes and hardboiled eggs, with kvass and smetana poured over it. Whole bowlfuls of raspberries and blackberries for breakfast, a decadence that feels scandalous coming from a country that sells raspberries in expensive 6-oz clams.

This trip is a little different from previous ones, when we’d gather at the kitchen table four times a day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and tea, because Anthony’s grandpa is 102 now and can’t get up so easily. Instead we take all the stools and set them up around his bed, where he’s still spirited enough to toast my arrival with shots of cognac. It’s only been him and Nadiya, Anthony’s aunt, for the last 15 years since Anthony’s grandmother died. And Elk, of course, the overexcited Pekingese. They live according to routine, with meals as the central organizing principle of the days. Nadiya shops and cooks almost everything they eat from scratch, and Ded (“Grandpa”) did all the dishes until recently. Even when he was more mobile, things like going out for dinner were rare and special occasions. Life happens inside the apartment, around the table and now around the bed.

It’s been hard for Anthony to watch his grandpa get older and lose his mobility, although his mind is still amazingly sharp. My own grandparents faded from me one by one, at retirement homes or, in my maternal grandmother’s case, alone in the house my mom was raised in. She and my paternal grandfather had lost the ability to recognize me many years before they passed. We did what we could for them at the end of their lives, organizing the schedules of their caretakers, stocking up my grandma on Costco-cases of Ensure, and my cousin doing a lot more, driving out to Anaheim frequently to visit. Still, it’s different from the perpetual and attentive care that comes from living with someone. Nadiya never had kids, but her life has revolved around care, for Ded and for Anthony, who was was dropped off here every summer growing up. I’ve wondered if she ever wanted to move away to a bigger city to pursue her music career or just to live in a new place. 

The way of living out here is older and not very consistent with the American middle-class dream. It’s fairly obvious to me that it’s a healthier way to live, raise a family, and die. When we marginalize older people in our society, stop asking them to be active participants in family or culture and expect them to subsist on cafeteria food, I’m not sure what else we expect but for them to diminish in mind and body. And the cost of our severed relationship between generations comes out in other ways, like the literal cost of childcare or the solitude of an adult life without a partner or kids. Still, as much as I’d argue that American individualism is a deleterious notion, it’s in me nonetheless. I want to be able to pick up and move to Canada or change my life in other abrupt and dramatic ways. Too much routine and responsibility would be stifling, I think. Wouldn’t it? This tension of commitment versus freedom, of roots or flight, is one I think about often.

I’m writing this from the balcony, which as I mentioned is the best balcony in the world. The apartment is in an enclave that used to be a military residential complex: a series of twisting footpaths and streets that are more like alleys winding around playgrounds and garden patches. Surrounding me are trees, most of them filled with food like cherries, walnuts, apples, and pears. When the outdoors is more of a private/public netherspace, you can plant fruit trees in a way I wouldn’t be allowed to at my local Brooklyn park. Ded planted the walnut tree in the back over a decade ago, and now it’s grown to shade the whole area. All I can hear are pigeons cooing and the shouts of neighborhood kids, with the occasional car driving slowly past. I could spend the rest of my days on this balcony, I think. I imagine different ways to live.