Memories
As we grow older in life and accumulate a great chest-full of memories, some of those become more precious than the discarded ones we cannot consciously recall or those we pushed further into our amnesia at will. Having lived in a full house with three siblings, grandparents and parents where the constant was that everything and everyone was almost always in motion, I have reached this point and space 50 years later evolving into a quiet, single, mature person’s peaceful lifestyle with pets as the only noisemakers. Those memories come to the surface when dogs are napping next to my feet, to be relived in my mind once again.
Tata and I - were sitting on the bench in front of HNK, eating sandwiches (after the skin specialist appointment was competed). A fine lady walked past, glancing coyly at a young peasant man and his little girl, who looked ashamed as they turned toward each other to hide their plain village food wrapped in a tea towel while they were tucking into their home baked dark bread, homemade sausages, and smelly spring onion. They sat on the bench in front of the manicured garden area of HNK not knowing about the fine art productions being held in the imposing yellow building in their backdrop, unless they saw some short announcement segments on TV, as they had lots of time waiting for the next train to take them to Sisak, and then to catch the ciro train from Sisak to Roviska. (*Zagreb main railway station is located within easy walking distance from HNK) Despite this and few other friendly visits to Zagreb, as a young girl hearing creepy-to-me jazz music on the radio while observing washed down, dull, grey cast Zagreb buildings from the bus window left a harsh Zagreb impression on me since.
Then the mind moves on to other pearls popping up from the 1970s: Mama buying me my first ever tiny bra; hearing stories about the buried Turkish arms in our ‘jezero’ (lake); or ‘Marsovci’ visiting our village (newspapers stunt to get a story); and grandfather teaching me to ride a bike are some of the most memorable highs of my childhood. During those early years, I experienced my first ever deja-vu - as my mama sat in the kitchen peeling potatoes and the light shone at an angle from the kitchen window right over her bathing her in its visible rays almost like a shower of light. The exact same scene replayed in my early teenage years, and I was gobsmacked, not knowing whether I had imagined being in the same situation once before, having the exact same conversation with my mum while the light was on her peeling some potatoes. I decided to keep the wonder to myself as I did not want my mama to think that something weird was going on if I asked her, ‘Have we been here before?’.
Grandmother’s lessons on productivity, self-sufficiency, and humbleness. Also, the look of approval on her face as she’d spot a well-maintained vegetable garden from the window of the passing bus. She’d cover my bus seat with a towel just in case to prevent getting any germs - I still wonder why she did that. Her language with old Slav words way of speaking. Her story of her fraternal auntie who died young while trying to pull out pumpkins, and save them as a feed for pigs, from the rising water of the flooding Kupa river, which caused her to contract ‘sušica’ and die soon after. My grandma read somewhere that preslica (horsetail) can assist in psoriasis healing, so she would make me bathe in preslica tea she made, and she did mention at that time that - I’d remember for the rest of my life how my baba bathed me in preslica. And - every time there is talk about horsetail - my mind goes straight to this memory drawer.
Us older siblings played a real estate property game with all three of us (Pajo was a toddler then so he was left out of the fun and games at that time) dividing a section of the yard into three separate land blocks and breaking up hundreds of tiny sticks to mark our territory by poking them into the soft ground to create our picket fence. We would then add more tiny sticks inside the block into a square shape to create a house shape. Then we would spend hours there, creating, dreaming, living, and learning about good neighbourhood matters - helping each other push those small branches into the soil to determine what parcel belongs to whom, and having fun - until the rain would get serious from a spitting level and adults would bring us all inside the actual brick and mortar house grandfather built in 1946.