Weeping Willow

I want to tell you about a place I love and hold within me. Although it cannot be expressed in its entirety, it cannot be truly shared. It so happened that in one small village on the bank of a river somewhere between two regions in the largest country, I learnt about the natural world, absorbed its archetypes and faces, which I recognize in new encounters with life to this day. Most of my associations come from this place called Lovzi (it can be translated in English as “trappers” or “catchers”). The fish catchers who gave their name to this settlement seemed to me a few centuries later to be the catchers of human souls, as written in the Gospel. I know that the secret of my connection with this summer house is that almost every childhood summer we lived here with my sister and grandfather, and later we lived here together with my grandfather during my vacations and holidays. Here I feel calm and good, here time slows down and a simple life emerges, the wisdom of which comes from the neighbourhood of plants and animals, the river and the fields. Our village changes every year, I am not a local and I am only here in the warm season. It does not belong to me because I am a city girl, but I belong to this place, which has given me so much and in many ways has educated my eye, my ear, my nose for the created world. This safe and dear home is unthinkable without my grandfather, its guardian and inhabitant. Our cottage is slowly deteriorating, my grandfather is slowly getting older, I am growing older, and I have less time to visit the place of my love and freedom. I am increasingly afraid of the moment when I will have to say goodbye to my home by the river, when my grandfather will be gone and my beloved world will fade into memories. It makes me sad to think of losing what I love here, even though this place cannot be appropriated by me, it is alive and living on its own, beyond my power or care. But inside myself, I keep coming here and know that our village has forever sprouted in my experience, and that no one can take that away from me.

* Here grow weeping willows, the sound of which I have heard since childhood only in Lovzi — the seemingly mirage-like melancholic sound-crying made by trees by the water. My grandfather and I could not find a scientific justification for this phenomenon. But after once hearing the weeping willows, it is hard to doubt this living presence.