I used to say that my grandparents small village was the best place in the world.
I was about seven when I made this statement. It was probably a sunny day, I was sitting on the wooden bench outside of the summer kitchen waiting for a dinner, pork cutlet with breading fried too dark, so there was a pretty hard shell on the meat, there were potatoes on the side and salty pickles in a ceramic container. Of course, it was right after eating beet top soup called bocwinka, eaten in a big metal bowl with little black spots and an aluminium air-light spoon, hot from the hot soup.
The summer kitchen was on a hill and I was looking across the sandy road, towards the river, hidden in the trees.
My uncle was sitting on the step to the kitchen, smoking a cigarette after the meal. He was bare foot since his rubber shoes, which he used to work in the field, would be to hot to sit in.
His wife came out of the hot kitchen and smoke a cigarette too. Nobody was sitting inside of the summer kitchen during the day. It was too hot and occupied by hundreds of flies. My grandma and my uncle’s wife would only stand there cooking and drying forest mushrooms over the wood stove. On Saturday nights, when the flies were sleeping, kids would be taking baths there, in a small steel tub.
It was a pretty warm place even after dark. Next door, in a “steamy room”, a big special unknown and unexplained time machine was boiling potatoes with some kind of grain mix for supper for the pigs. We could ask my uncle for some boiled potatoes picked out of it, which were a very delicious night snack, eaten with salt.
So I was sitting there and made my statement, before my bath which would make my whole body itch and burn from all the bruises and scratches, especially if I had been running through the just harvested rye field, and before my pig potato snack, and before spending the next morning picking wild blueberries.
Blueberries grew in a far away forest and we could only go there with an adult person. There were wetlands and snakes there, but also plenty of blueberries and the biggest mushrooms – if you knew the secret places. And at the edge of this forest was the end of my shire.
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