Grammy’s Village

It’s taken me a while to write this post because it’s the most important to me.  We saved the best and worst for last.  The trip from Sibiu to the small village of  Macedonia was long and dreary.  It was a chilly overcast day, we left the beauty of Transylvania early in the morning (9 AM for this group) for the western side of Romania — The Banat.

When I was a girl my grandmother told me she came from a village in the Banat, and I had no idea what that meant.  In my child’s mind, I envisioned an idyllic village where the peasants wore traditional clothing, animals were pets,  and that she sat in mulberry trees eating until she was full.  I could see 7 sisters and brothers playing in meadows under a blue sky.

The drive was long, the natives restless.  We stopped for a quick detour to Corvin Castle in Hunedoara. You can see by the photo that the sky was angry.  This 12th century castle had a history of torture and was really a window into how oppressed the country has been for centuries.

Because we really needed to make time, we stopped for a quick sandwich at a gas station.  I bought 4 sandwiches for under $10.  The people here make an average of $1200 a month — this keeps everything very inexpensive, but it also keeps the people feeling pretty powerless.  We were all desperate for a bathroom about 2 hours after lunch and the only place we could find was a rough bar in a small town that Auntie Anna lived in with her first husband.  You can see that the building was a 19th century jewel that has fallen into despair, like much of the Banat.As we entered the very small village of Macedonia, everyone was feeling a bit depressed.  Marginal lunch, long drive, monotonous and despairing landscape.  But we were there.  The land my of grandmother.  The place she and Auntie Lena and Auntie Anna grew up in.  The church that they attended, the school that they went to, the roads that they played in, the place that was home.  I feel her so palpably when I’m there.  The village is desolate — everyone is gone, the animals are old, the geese run around in packs, the donkey and milk cow wander freely.  A old woman on a bike, another hunched over, a man in ragged clothing, a very small store and the church.

Still beautiful and majestic.  It was other worldly compared to the abandoned village.  I understand why my grandmother was so very religious after standing in her church.  I will never know what the village was like in 1900, but I’ve picked a house that could have been hers and now I can envision her early life.That bucolic image I had was a child’s fantasy.  Here was the wood and mud home that she lived in.  Those 7 brothers and sisters — only two survived childhood.  A hard life, a sad life.  Very much like the drive to the village, her young life was a difficult one.  Was she directing out visit?  Was she trying to give us a taste of what that life was like?  She is always with me, that much I know.  And here she is with my grandfather on their engagement, in the new world, with their new life.  Because of her, my sisters and I have had the most wonderful lives — lives she could have never imagined for us.  We have had every opportunity, every advantage, but most of all we have had her love and her guidance.  I hear her everyday in so many little ways and I am so very very grateful.  She set an example for all of us and I truly hope I can set the same example for my grandchildren.  I know that would make her happy.