My nicest memories of summer holidays are of the ones which I spent at my grandmother’s place. When I was very young my parents took me and my sister to our grandmother’s village. I remember so many great things about those warm and sunny times. I was young and enthusiastic, playful, bit hard to be kept on a short leashJ, always trying out something new, playing pirate, falling in love with Eve, the neighbour’s granddaughter and so on. There I was almost every summer for about 10 weeks, under the severe eyes of my grandma. I thought of her as a somewhat stricter character, and now I realize that she had a very kind side of hers, which was always there cloaked with that strictness what a 10 year or child might only perceive. She was definitely a person with an excellent sense of humour and a very hard worker. She had to grow up fast, didn’t have a long and trouble free childhood and life had taught her to work for everything she owned and that’s what she did till the very end.
Once I went with her to work on the field. We picked hemp for a few hours. I remember as a child I couldn’t do it for too long, because my hands started burning, and also it was really difficult to wash all of it off my hands.
Yet, comfortable or uncomfortable situations, I remember many of them.
I remember going out with her and she was scything on the field. That is supposed to be a man’s job, and she did it just as well. Other times we spent a lot of time in her back garden, harvesting raspberries, gooseberries, or going off to her “lower garden” to get some cucumbers and peppers. We harvested potatoes and put them in a large wheelbarrow, pushed and pulled it back several kilometres till we got back to her house. We went to a mill not too far and we bargained for flour. Then she baked the best homemade bread, which usually weighed more than 3 kilos and was twice as big as my head. In the evenings she used to do the mix for the pigs, feed the chicken, the dogs and cats. This used to be my grandfather’s job, but he didn’t always do all of it…well…he actually hated all the chicken, hated the cat, and despised the dog; he was a mean old man. He always reminds me of Eustace from the cartoon Courage the cowardly dog. So my grandmother helped him out with most of the stuff, and after he passed away she did all of it naturally.
Once I was playing with the dogs and I was outside in the dirt for quite a while and got covered with head lice. It didn’t feel too comfortable when she started to wash my head with her coarse hands. I will remember those lice now.
Twice on a week I used to go with her to collect the milk. She didn’t have a cow, but others in the village were selling and it was always fresh, after the cows were milked.
I loved to see the cows coming back from the field, all of them knew which house they were living in, and some people were standing in front of their houses to greet them I suppose. Then they got milked after a good long day. And there I was sitting with my grandma at Pali’s place, who was doing the milking while we were waiting. Sometimes they offered me to drink the fresh milk but I didn’t really like it. Somehow I always had a thing for fatty milk, I can only drink the skimmed one. What I remember though is the smell of the milk, the smell of the cows, ahm and cowpoo, the peaceful evening atmosphere, the dark outside and the gossip inside in the poorly lit kitchen of the house, ah and the chicken in the kitchen. They used to stay there because the ones which have recently hatched, the baby chicken, were safer to be kept inside, till they have grown a bit. And the kitchen was the warmest place for the chicken. And the cat didn’t mind.
