You responded warmly to yesterday's post. I am encouraged to tell the rest of the story.
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Ed Kinney wrote to identify yesterday’s wildflower as a European field pansy. His namesake, our son, figured out that the beautiful black and orange creature is a European fire salamander.
I liked the picture of Oksana and me. You saw Eddie's back as he made the fire and not much of Zoriana. Today is to make up for it. First, here's a picture of the other four guys on our hike. Viktor, Yarema, Eddie and Mykola.
From the day before here's a photo of Eddie, Zoriana and Victor’s youngest Lucas with local artisanal goodies at the Uzhgorod castle.
And another of Eddie and Zoriana climbing the cherry tree.
Sasha and Victor live in a suburb of Uzhgorod called Veliki Lazy, which translates as big crawl. I think Big Lazy fits it to a T. On a walk through the village yesterday afternoon I stumbled on the official trailhead for yesterday's venture. Walking from their house, we joined the trail about 2 miles in. This photograph describes the trail. 16 kilometers long, rising from 127 meters above sea leval to almost 800. We bailed at the next-to-the-last stop, the village of Yarok shown in orange dotted lines, before the steep climb.
Veliki Lazy is quiet and pastoral. Here's a shepherd and his goat in the middle of a field, and a farmer with a traditional wagon - albeit now with rubber tires, on the main street.
This somber memorial is right at the trailhead. The big one in the middle says "Glory to the defense of the fatherland." Those to the side memorialize two guys both born in 1925 and died in 1945.
This touches one of the themes that I'm working, that answering the call to arms and defending your country only sometimes makes sense. If it ever does, today's Ukraine is one such time and place. We are in an existential battle. I somehow doubt that two boys from the border country sacrificing their lives in the dying days of the war, for a Soviet Union which had forced itself on them only a few years earlier, qualifies. Toastmasters vice president of education has asked me to give a speech Saturday. This is going to be the topic.
After last night's 14 hour trip, once again sharing a bunk with Marianna, I am looking forward to a full night in my own bed. Tomorrow I will take the girls to kindergarten, meet with the neighbors about repaving the road in front of the dachas we own 1 km away, and get some exercise for the first time in a week.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where things are more or less back to normal. I love normalcy.
I am in the middle of reading the copy of Steinbeck's Russian Journal that you left here. Steinbeck really liked the few days he spent around Kyiv, during which he visited those two villages, both named Shevchenko.
There are monuments like the one in the photo in every village in Ukraine. Sometimes, we forget the cost of war. For those of us who are not fighting, let me tell a story from the annals of Ukraine post WWII. John Steinbeck and a photographer came to the Soviet Union in 1947 and visited several places, including Ukraine. In one village, there were two men still alive. The village was populated by women, but I can't remember the exact number. However, 47 comes to mind., but I am probably wrong. In a village near the small town of Lipovitz, there is another monument, but much larger, for it has more than 25 graves of boys killed in the Great Patriotic war. There are about 50 dwellings in this village. You can do the math.
In my daughter's family, one grandmother recently died. She was the only surviving child in a family of twelve at the end of the war. She was 5 when the war started, and her older sisters looked after her when their mother and father were killed. The sisters were raped and murdered by the Nazis on the way through and on the way back. Somehow, this girl of ten managed to survive.
I knew another Ukrainian girl whose great-great grandmother held her family together during the Holodomor, finding a way to feed her sisters and brothers ins spite of the Soviets. The family still lives in the village which is located near Poltava. During the war, my friend's grandmother had her head shaved so that she would look like a boy and wouldn't be raped. We spent the day in that village and stood outside the fence of the graveyard where six generations of that family has lived, paying homage to the human spirit which seems to overcome generations of cruelty and horror.