I bought a bike a couple weeks ago. Talk about a whole new way to experience the crappy Moldovan roads! I joke that my bike has automatic transmission – the gears shift spontaneously as I bounce over the bumpy roads. I enjoy the exercise, as well as the opportunity to expand my regular treks a bit farther beyond the confines of the village. It’s also somehow liberating to know that I now have the ability to go somewhere else. It’s nice to know that I could, for example, go to Ceadir-Lunga in the afternoon, or on a Monday, or on any other day or at any other time when the one bus isn’t working. I don’t know if I’ll ever use the bike for more than just exercise, but the freedom and independence I feel just from knowing I have the means and ability to go somewhere is satisfying.
I mentioned in my last post the day last week when I had accidentally done everything I had to do by 10:00 am. I say “accidentally” because I do try actually try to spread things out over the course of a day or several days to fill up my time. My big mistake that day was actually getting up and out of the house too early. Sometimes I forget that I doesn’t do me any good to jump out of bed raring to go; I’ll just end up with inordinate amount of time with nothing to do.
When I got home, I considered going for a bike ride, but after a string of exceptionally unbusy days, I was aching for to something to accomplish. I told Babushka I wanted to work with her in the garden. At first, she balked and told me I should rest, which was the last thing I wanted to do anymore. I told her I was sick and tired of resting, that I really wanted to do work. She gave me a hard look, shrugged her shoulders, and said “Alright, we’ll work!”
This 75-year old woman never ceases to amaze me. She is tiny, but appears even smaller from being permanently hunched-over. A lifetime of work on farms, where most of the planting, weeding and harvesting was done by hand, has left her and many other women of her generation almost bent in half at the waist. She is incredibly strong, her mind is sharp, her hearing is excellent, and her 50-year old son doesn’t understand why he needs reading glasses but yet she doesn’t. In the summer, she spends nearly all day in the garden, and in the evenings she cleans and separates the wool that she will spin into thread throughout the winter. She is never still or without work.
So, on this day, I headed out to the garden with her. Our first task was to cut and gather grasses for the chickens, geese, turkeys and rabbits. A constant supply of greens is needed for their farm animals, and they are fed both wild grasses and weeds as well as plants from the garden. We walked down to the bottom of the hill, where a little stream runs, and started to work on an overgrown area. She cut the tall grass and weeds with a pair of garden shears and I piled it up onto a burlap cloth. When she decided the load was sufficient, I carried it back up the hill and piled it up outside the back gate. After about 45 minutes we had the area pretty well cleared, and so started working on the rows of grapevines. She trimmed off the stray, unproducing vines and again piled them up on the burlap cloth for me to carry up the hill to our pile. Cutting back the straggling vines served to both provide greens for the animals as well as clear the path between the rows in preparation for the grape harvesting, which will begin soon. Altogether, I probably made 15 or 20 trips up the hill with my bundle.
Planted intermittently between the grapevines are cucumbers vines. They’ve been pretty thoroughly picked, but we nonetheless continued to find cucumbers here and there, and had a good time congratulating each other on a particularly good find. Babushka and I have never been able to have much of an in-depth conversation as her Russian is even worse than mine; she’s spoken Bulgarian all her life and being an illiterate farm laborer, never had much need to learn or use Russian. We tried to chat as we worked, though. She told me the names of various plants and herbs in Bulgarian. We had one of our typical funny and perplexing exchanges:
“A woman is coming Friday?”
“Yes, my friend Joanna is coming for the weekend.”
“Where is she from?”
“She lives in a small village near Cahul.”
“She’s like you? An American?”
“Yes, she’s also a Peace Corps Volunteer. But she doesn’t speak Russian, she speaks Moldovan.”
“She doesn’t speak Russian?”
“No, only English and Moldovan.”
“But what about her husband? He speaks Russian.”
“She’s not married.”
“She’s not married?”
“But what about the husband? He speaks Russian.”
“She’s not married. She’s coming here alone.”
“But the husband speaks Russian.”
This went on for another minute or two, until she finally gave it up. I could tell she was trying to convey something, but she couldn’t say it in Russian and I couldn’t guess what it was. Truthfully, I was started to think she was losing it. Hours later, I suddenly realized what she had been trying to say. The word for “husband’ and for “man” in Russian are similar (“muzh” and “muzhchina”, respectively). She had been thinking of my PCV friend Igor, also in Cahul, who does speak Russian.
We worked in the vines for an hour or so, and then took a break for lunch. I was as tired as I was exhausted, so after a quick and simple meal, I went to lay down for a bit. During the hot summer days, Anya and I got in the habit of a siesta after lunch, when it’s too hot to be outside doing anything. Babushka took a break from the garden labor, but of course didn’t take a nap; she worked on her wool. I very rarely can actually sleep during the day, and instead I use my siesta time to read or write. This day, though, I slept like the dead for solid 2 hours. When I woke up, word had spread that I was in a working mood and Anya had a project waiting for me. She was cleaning hundreds of tomatoes and wanted me to run them through the food processor. Eventually, she cooked them up with some red peppers, onions, and spices and canned the sauce for the winter.
Babushka hadn’t forgotten that I had said I’d work with her again after my rest, so I headed back to the garden. She had already cleared 2 more long rows of vines, and piled the cuttings. I walked along the rows collecting the vines into my burlap and made another 5 or 6 trips to haul it all back up the hill. I felt good to see the fruits of our labor, 2 huge piles of fodder for the animals. “This will be good for a couple of days, I’m sure,” I thought to myself. So naïve! It was gone by lunchtime the next day.
It’s an incredible amount of work to feed all their livestock. Not only are the greens fed to the animals, but a significant portion of the vegetables, too – overripe and “defective” (misshapen, small, etc) cucumbers are fed to the pigs and birds; squash, melons, and apples are chopped up or grated into small pieces for the turkeys. Babushka methodically chops up our watermelon rinds, too, for feed. A “kasha” or cereal is cooked up a couple times a day for the pigs.
I’m embarrassed to admit that a woman 40 years older than me has more stamina and endurance, but it’s true! Babushka put me to shame that day, although she would never say so herself. She gladly accepted my help, even though sometimes my help is more work for her since I don’t usually know what I’m doing. She is always in a good mood, smiling and finding satisfaction in whatever she is doing, as long as it’s work!
Anka in Kyiv 