old pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott) — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:44:00 +0000

I found some old B/W pictures.

Here is my mama. The year is 1947 and Warsaw is still in ruins. For about two years, every Sunday, people who returned to the city after the war would go out, look for clean whole bricks and stack them up, so construction crews had some building materials available. My mama is 35 years old. She is a lawyer, with two small kids at home, and -- like everybody else -- she works six days a week. She also stacks bricks on Sundays. Her string of beads astonishes me: beads, in the ruins? Her expression does not: she is all there, alert -- her usual look.

The man standing behind her is her colleague, Mr. Podolski; I imagine her whole office showed up. He was the first adult who told me that if I looked really closely I will notice that deep shadows are not just grey but purple, and he went on to explain some ideas of Impressionism. I agreed with him about the purple just to be polite.

I think he was in love with my mama. My father found his poems in her bag once and was really disturbed by them. I know this, because he told me. And I imagine she read these fiery verses, smiled, and went back to whatever she was doing. Lawyering? Standing in endless lines to buy food? Attending to her kids' school work? Stacking clean whole bricks which had to be stacked?

I just hope she found enough time to read the poems.

This frame is also from 1947. Since my parents worked at the Ministry of Forestry we were allowed to rent a room in one of the forestry farms in the countryside during the summer. This forestry farm had a full array of animals, including horses, dogs, cows and geese.

But as soon as we arrived -- by train and horse carriage -- from the train station, the forester warned us not to come close to the chained barnyard dog who barked furiously. The adults went in to have some tea but when they emerged they could not find me until two heads peered out from the dog's kennel. Rex and I became great friends and the forester eventually allowed me to take the dog for long forest walks.

And this is 1949. I know the date, because now we have a dog and Czertez is still a puppy. After he grows up he will go hunting waterfowl with my father and me, and the family will pluck, roast and eat every game bird we can bring.

I am walking to school through a park adjacent to the Ministry of Forestry where my parents work and where we have an apartment. The apartment has no hot water, the heat in winter is poor, but we have a place to live and it is safe. Some new tree saplings in the park are planted by the "Ministry children" during Forest Day, celebrated nationally. I planted some of them, too, and when I visit Warsaw I can still identify one, now fully grown. It came down once during a wind storm, and after I found it I propped it up and waited for someone to show up and help me string up its broken guy wires.

I remember how freely we kids moved in the post-war city. Our parents trusted our street smarts to stay safe. Someone -- my mother? -- snapped this picture, and then she must have taken the pup home because I could not bring him to my classes. Having her along that day was unusual, because I walked to school by myself since I was six. And Czertez and I roamed together as soon as I returned home. No one ever asked where we went, and we were not talking about it.

Years later, already living in New York, I wrote a short story about Czertez and got it published in "Dog Fancy" magazine. The mag was founded in 1970 -- the same year I wrote it -- and grabbed it right away. I was paid $50, a royal sum for my first writing attempt in English. I wrote it in the subway on my way back from work.

My first trip abroad. I went to Romania to stick my nose out of Poland and see the Black Sea in 1959

Climbing days in the Tatras; with Momo, in 1963

Momo dreaming

In Warsaw with little Tara, my excellent friend Magda, her mama, grandmother and aunt, in 1985

Paddling with John in Hell's Canyon in Idaho, 2019

And now I really need some color here! John is about to eat hard boiled murres' eggs in our camper -- Iceland, 2015

Yva

Momatiuk Eastcott

old pictures