Gniazdowo. The village that was home to me for the first three years of my life and nearly all the summers after, all the way into adulthood. It's where my grandparents and then just my grandmother lived. It's where I taught myself to ride a scooter and then a bike. It's where I lay down on a shallow sandy bend in the river and felt the water trickle past me on both sides. It's where bees from local bee hives swooped down and sometimes got tangled in my hair sending me screaming for help to my grandma. It's where my sister and I picked mushrooms after a rainfall and forget-me-nots and buttercups along the river's edge on better weather days.
The last time I visited Gniazdowo was in 2017. And before that? Passing through, in the winter, with Ed. And before that? When I was a mother of two young girls. And before that? When I myself was still a teenager, just starting college. Glancing at Ocean's sidebar, I can see that in the last two decades, I have spent well over a hundred days in Poland. Only two or three have been in Gniazdowo. Why is that? If you have read Like A Swallow, you'll know all about the place. I loved my time there and, being raised in the style of "go play, dont bother me, come back in time for dinner," it's where I learned to be very independent and self-reliant. My grandma and grandpa have been gone for quite a while now (my grandpa's birthday was in 1885, my grandma's -- in 1901), but not too long ago, my sister purchased the house and garden that had once been their home, and she has been slowly restoring it so that it could soon be habitable even in the colder seasons. She spends most of the warm season days in Gniazdowo. So why have I resisted going there more often?
The fact is that I rarely go back in time. Not never, but rarely. I don't look to rekindle some past emotion or attachment. Gniazdowo was monumentally important to me when I was young. But it's not the same now. My grandparents aren't there, running the ship. I'm not a child, finding ways to amuse myself on a bike or in the river on a hot day. There aren't freshly baked snacking cakes on the verandah nor vats of syrups steeping with sugared pine tree tips for our cups of tea. The forest hasn't the mushrooms we once hunted down, the meadow by the river's edge isn't vast and naked anymore, the fields aren't planted with wheat with the occasional volunteer red poppies in their midst, nor with the red berry rowan trees separating the narrow strips of cultivated fields. Indeed, there's not much farming taking place around Gniazdowo any more. The place has changed, and more importantly, I have moved on.
And yet...
There is that pull to go back. Every half dozen years, maybe after some vivid dream, maybe after I let myself drift around my childhood images again. So on this trip I told my sister -- you needn't come into town to see me, I'll come to Gniazdowo.
I wake up early.
(Good morning, Warsaw!)
After the horribly healthy breakfast. Sigh...
... I walk along the Nowy Swiat street (which looks a heck of a lot better today in the sunlight!)...
... all the way to the metro station, so that I can catch the metro to the Wilenski train station. A small place. It has trains heading to the northeast of Poland. Not anywhere else.
I meet my nephew there. In all my more recent visits to Poland, he was still in Sweden, but like my sister, he has moved back now and so I have the utter pleasure of seeing him here. He offered to come with me to Gniazdowo.
We travel along the same train line I would take all those years I went to Gniazdowo -- first, accompanied by my mother, eventually by myself. We pass the same familiar train stations, I see the sandy soil that seems so hospitable to the tall red pines that grow densely here.
And an hour after leaving Warsaw, we cross the River Liwiec, the train stops, and we get off. (It's a new added stop and it shortens for us the walk to Gniazdowo. Used to be 60 minutes from the station, now it's just about 35.)
My sister meets us at the station...
Hello, house of childhood worries and dreams! (When I moved to my grandmother's care here as an infant, the house had only the two rooms -- those that are set behind the red brick wall. My grandfather eventually added the green verandah, and much later -- the upstairs attic rooms.)
The verandah has never been heated and so we ate there only in the summer months and yet it remains such a fixture in my heart and soul. Where you ate your childhood meals is important!
The three of us take a walk. This is what you do in the country. So many walks, taken over so many years!
Through the forest of red pines, to the river's edge. And yes, we wade in it. It's irresistible and very warm!
In the forest itself, there stands a building that was once acquired by the composer, Ignacy Paderewski and his wife. The house is called Julin. They didn't own it for long. The wife had the idea that it should be a place where girls were schooled in the art of raising chickens. Or something. The Paderewskis were very social-minded. But they sold it in 1933 so that it could house orphan boys instead. It remained a boy's orphanage for all the years and summers I spent in Gniazdowo.
About a half dozen years ago, the orphanage, now accepting girls as well, moved to a new space that was more modern and appropriate -- right in the village itself. Julin, the building above, has been turned into a mini museum about the Paderewskis, and a big chunk of the forest is now a park and learning center focusing on environmental concerns.
My grandfather, who was very much a community activist and on good terms with the director of the orphanage, took us to Julin to show as the very fist television ever (Julin had electricity, the rest of the village, our house included, did not).
And in leafing through the visitors' book today, we came across this, from a recent visitor here:
Loosely translated it reads -- In the years 1959-1961, I was cared for in the Children's House of Julin. I think fondly of my time spent here. Currently, I am retired and am 77 years old. Signed: Jan Zdzislaw Ch.
So... if this guy was there watching the Mickey Mouse Club along with the other boys in 1959, and we were there watching the same TV show in that year at Julin, we would have shared the TV room with him then, no? Weird! In a good way.
We continue our walk.
Into the fields, behind the forest. This is the kind of road that crisscrossed the villages here when I was young. (Now, the main road is paved but the side roads are still sandy wheel tracks.)
We are dazzled by a fragrant meadow of white flowers to the side of the road! What are they, anyway??
(My plant identifier later tells me that it's Galium boreale... Northern bedstraw.)
And I love seeing so many rowan trees to the side of the road!
Luck would have it that our old playmate from those summers in Gniazdowo is in her now summer home here. She asks us to come over, feeds us berries and coffee and of course, we reminisce.
Our old friend is my sister's age and her childhood home was not in Warsaw so we only saw her in the summers, except that things have an odd way of pivoting and changing directions. She eventually married a Swede and moved to Stockholm (where she still lives) and my sister moved to Stockholm too, but even so, they continued to all come to Gniazdowo, with their own kids, and so the connection remained significant for all of them. I'm the outlier. I stopped coming back.
At my sister's place, we eat lunch prepared by her. Cold beet soup ("chlodnik"), a veggie pancake, salad, cakes with the mirabelle tiny plums massively falling down from trees now.
And then we look at the clock and we realize that even if we rushed we would not be in Warsaw before 8. The day just flew by so quickly!
Too quickly.
My sister travels back with us to the city. We walk to the train station along a road that is barely recognizable now. We pass the rare remaining farmstead (most farmers appear to have sold their land to those wanting to build vacation homes). A farmer's work was too hard, paid too little, and the soil, climate -- all were too unpromising.
The train ride is a sweet one hour: comfortable, and without the loud black locomotive that used to pull passenger cars along this route.
In Warsaw, I turn toward the hotel, and I sift through the day's events, feelings, thoughts, recollections.
So happy to have made the trip back -- to Warsaw, and today -- to Gniazdowo.
(I pick up a babeczka for an evening munch.)
Such a good day it was. Exceptional!
with love...
