Destination Poland: Saturday

“Let the world be at war, only leave the Polish village in peace and quiet.” – S. Wyspianski (1901)

Why have I looked forward for so to blogging from Poland? Ocean is not, after all, a journal. Not at all. NOT AT ALL! What I most wanted to do was write about the Poland that I grew up with, through my now Americanized eyes. The pictures are ones that I have had, in a sense, in my mind long before they were taken. I truly carry them with me always, even though I rarely talk about it.

Okay, this week of Poland posts cannot be complete without a trek to my grandparents’ village, where I lived the first three years of my life and visited just about yearly until I left for the States as an adult.

Village life for me is, was, all about meadows and forests and farmsteads, dead pigs wheeled from the market, narrow strips of fields (Polish farmland remained mostly privatized after the war), farm men and women, chapels on dirt roads, children watching as you go by, watching, waiting, waiting for the next big event in their lives. [See photos of all these images below.] Village life in Poland has almost nothing in common with life on a Midwestern farm, of that I am certain. Crops are grown, animals are raised, there ends the similarity. I wonder if even from this handful of photos a reader can understand this profound cultural divide.

At the bottom of the photo-roll I’ve posted a picture of the house that my grandfather built, one room at a time. Eventually it grew, then shriveled and crumbled in disrepair. My sister has only recently managed to lay claim to it again and is now trying, along with my nephew, to bring it back to life, one floorboard at a time. Fifty years ago it was surrounded by cherry and apple trees and an organic garden (my grandparents were the original naturalists!). Little of that remains. But the pond outside has frogs and fish again and the river is getting so that you can see the sandy bottom once more. Progress in this case means going back to the way I remember it from almost half a century ago.