Today is Orthodox Christian holiday — Provody. It’s a day when you go and visit your dead relatives.
Every year, our entire family goes to the home village of my dad. Me and my brother also spent a considerable part of our childhood in there. Village itself is located quite far from us, and takes a few hours to get to. It’s also not very big and is very traditional and old. So it’s extremely rural there. It’s surrounded by forests and fields, and there isn’t much civilization if you go in certain directions.
This certainly makes the village special for me. I really like the old traditional ways there, and of course people are really disconnected from the hussles of outside world, so it always filled me with calmness.
My brother and I always wanted to go to the village for a few days. Since we aged, we haven’t really visited it for longer than just 1 day. We always wanted to explore all the old places we used to play in. We finally decided a few days ago to spend 2 days there - Sunday and Monday, so we’d have a decent amount of time to explore. My brother took a day off from his job on Monday.
Today I had to wake up early. I got a call from dad at 8 AM telling me to start preparing myself for the go. He then arrived alone… I asked why, and apparently █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
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Me and dad went into the road then.
As always, the road is just endless fields and endless forests. It’s nice and calming, which is exactly what we needed. On the way to the village dad picked up his classmate. They had a bunch of conversations about their childhood (they’re both elderly now), so it was interesting to listen to.
We always arrive to the cemetery first. Even though the air was cold, the sun shined brightly and warmly. I like the dissonance.
Even in such a small village, there was a few graves for soldiers that died recently in the current war.
Just before entering the cemetery, dad accidentally dropped the package with candles, and 2 out of 3 broke :(
"I’ll lit it up for my mother, she gave me my life.". "Sorry, dad.". It made me tear up a bit, so I had to hide it until it went away.
We then met my aunt (his sister), which is the closest relative to me in the village. She is the one that’s looking up for their parents house and she’s the one we always come to visit the most. Then more of the relatives and people I know came. We then visited all other relative’s graves, and went to hear the prayer ceremony.
After it was all done, we went to the other relative, and have a dinner there. It’s a little bit of a deja vu to me every time, because same thing happens every single year. The dishes are always exactly the same. Even where I sit is always the same. The only thing that changes is that everyone is 1 year older. They have a lot of kids, and it’s crazy to see how fast everyone grows up. It really feels like they’re completely different people now.
After the dinner at the relative’s house, we then went to the aunt’s house (aka our true family house, where dad’s parents lived).
This place is an actual cat heaven. My aunt owns 6 cats, and 2 more cats also come there from other houses too. I kept petting and patting and holding all the cats I could get my hands on.
There’s also 2 dogs, a lot of goats and probably some other animals I couldn’t see.
While in the mean time they ██████████████████████████████████████.
After it was all done, we went inside the house, and like in old times we were just having the loud cozy chatter while drinking tea. And I layed on the favorite bed of mine, mostly listening.
Most of the relatives that came with us eventually left, and my dad suddenly asked my aunt if she wanted to visit ██████████████, a quarry deep in the forest they used to spend a lot of time in (and I visited that forest a lot too when I was a kid!). She said she wasn’t there for a very long time, and was interested to see it again. So we quickly got in the car and went going.
You might’ve heard from me that pine is my favorite tree before. It’s because of this forest. So dear and special to me. The road there was beautiful, just as expected. They talked about how the roads became different yet they still could remember where things still were. Dad could predict that there would be some trees incoming before we got to them, even though we were basically in middle of nowhere, many kilometers deep into the forest. Interestingly, I recognized some places too, even though I haven’t been here for many, many years and I was still basically a kid when I was here.
Eventually we arrived to the quarry, which was filled with water.
The water had a red tint, which was very visible near the beach. I was told it’s because it’s mixed with peat (torf).
We then went a little bit further to see a different quarry (which was also filled with water). They’re now full of water because nobody is pumping it out anymore, as they’re no more in use anymore.
This one was way smaller and overgrown.
We then started going back, through the different road in the forest. On the way back we found █████████████████ memorial, for victims of ███████████████████████████████████. The candles were lit, meaning someone came all the way here just to do the same as we did in our cemetery. I was very happy to see such a beautiful and cared-for memorial in basically middle of nowhere, kilometers deep in the forest.
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After that we came back. I got to walk more in the «backyard» (although it’s hard to call it that) where me and my brother spent a huge amount of time of kids. Every time I went to visit my aunt, that place was blocked by a small swamp in front of it, so I haven’t had a chance to properly walk in there for many years. This year, there was almost no swamp. I could finally see everything up close.
This is when I really realized - everything feels so small. All the places that I visit in the village, they seemed so vast and far away. But now that I’m older, they all seem so close to each other, I almost felt claustrophobic, despite being in completely open space! It felt uncomfortable, and I really wished to be smaller… Both physically and mentally. I walked further, to the other road that looped back to house eventually.
Eventually, I was back to the house, and unfortunately it was time for us to go home. No multi-day trip again :( Maybe next time…
The road back home was uneventful. I visited parents house, we had more chat about █████████████, and then my brother drove me home. We got hotdogs at the gas station on the way there, that were meh. Not like actually bad taste, but just barely any sauce and flavor. Unlike the ones from April 12, which were amazing. We also bought some snacks in the supermarket, and then got home and played Rain World.
Got to █████████████ (second shelter) and he had to go. Didn’t progress that much lol, it was pretty hard.
I felt very tired after all this, so I just went to bed. It was a good day.
