A Place so Very Disconnected

There is a strange disconnect from the places you lived when you had spent most of your life moving. You never quite feel at home anywhere. I spent a great deal of my life moving from place to place, country to country, and city to city. However, my grandmother's house, in a small isolated village in Belarus, will always be the place I consider to have had the most significant impact during my childhood.

After my parents divorced, my mother and I moved back to Belarus. At that point in my life, I had yet to begin kindergarten, and we had already lived in Germany before moving to the United States. Even when we had gotten to the United States my life was filled with constant moving.

I was a modern-day nomad, coming and going with the seasons.

Eastern Europe is a place filled with poverty of different kinds, and we were only one of the shades of poor that could be found there. We moved in with my grandmother, in a tiny village, speckled with a few houses. A place isolated from society, back then, just getting to her home was difficult. A bus would leave us in the middle of nowhere, with only fields and forests as far as the eye could see. My mother and I would wad through miles of fields. Back then, with my little legs, the journey seemed more daunting than it really was.

I am not sure what I found so enchanting in my time living there. Maybe it was the deathly silence in the middle of the night. Or the stark darkness under which all the stars in the night sky could be seen. Perhaps it was the wild freedom that came with living disconnected from the rest of the world. It is a freedom that I have spent most of my life searching for.

Nights would be spent running around large bonfires during warm summer nights. Catching frogs and snails while my uncle fished in the lake.

We spent spring and summer days mushroom and berry hunting. Most of our food was grown in the garden, which my grandmother tended to, and whatever we did not make ourselves, we would get from the neighbors. I was living the cottage-core dream.

I am filled with strong nostalgia over my time there, bathing in a wooden tub with water warmed over the fire, swimming in the lake near the house with my cousin, and spending all day running through the woods.

The barn and the lake behind it were our favorite places with my cousin when we lived there. Looking at it now, the barn leans to one side, wood rotting. Maybe it had always been like this, but back as children, we never noticed. Hiding in stacks of hay from our parents and relaxing in the shade it offered during hot summer days.

I visited the village this past summer. It had changed drastically. Now my little secret piece of heaven was no longer secret. A road had been made so that people could easily get to the village, and city dwellers crawled around the forest and fields looking for mushrooms. Something that had once been a necessity for us had now become a glorified hobby. However, the air is still as fresh as I remember. The place which had been so disconnected from civilization when I was a child has slowly started to evolve. My visit brought me to the realization that the world is ever-changing. Change does not wait for you or care for your childish memories. It still is beautiful, and my grandmother and uncle still accept me with open arms. Even if one day, the cabins will be replaced with skyscrapers and the dirt roads with cement, I will always remember the isolated village of my childhood.