Poems about Dragon Fruit, Daily Bread, Enlightenment and Memories

 

DRAGON FRUIT AWARENESS

              —for Ian, after Amtrak ride from Arizona

Enlightenment is like the taste of dragon fruit—

refreshing, neither sweet nor sour.

It feels just right when you know if all—

the whys, the therefores. The “Is God evil

since there’s evil all around us?” And

“Where’s God?”—”Omnipresent”—

Spinoza said— “There’s nothing

that is not God.” Or, to put it bluntly,

“everything is divine.”

You say dragon fruit tastes boring,

it tastes like nothing. So does awareness,

neither sad nor happy. You know it all

and you know nothing—

except that the lifeforce of trees

is a million zillion times stronger

than the most powerful weapons

that humans make—except that

the nuclear power of children’s

laughter can break the hardened

rock of an indifferent heart—

except... I cannot fully explain it.

It cannot be put into words.

You just have to taste it yourself.

Here’s a slice of the dragon fruit,

an afterimage of stars in midnight sky.

Its taste? Just right—

neither sweet, nor sour.

(C) 2024 by Maja Trochimczyk, published in California Quarterly 50:2, Summer 2024

                       

I've had several theological discussions with my atheist youngest son, Ian, while my spiritual beliefs went through a complete transformation. Like him, I was an atheist in my youth, but I converted to Catholicism and was baptized as an adult, at 30 years old. Then, after years of emigration and trauma, and the death of my Mother who was a lapsed Catholic admiring Buddhism and talking to plants, I slowly drifted away from dogma, while keeping the cultural affiliation. I've reached a personal awareness about spirituality, cosmos, and my place on this earth that includes reincarnation, each incarnated episode - a new lesson in living well in the body, living well in the material world, and finding the immaterial values of love, gratitude, wisdom and compassion far more important than anything made of dense matter... Inspired by many others, I wrote my own prayers, designed my own meditations, and found footing on my own path - that still involves Catholic traditions and the acceptance of the Commandments as the immutable spiritual law for humans on this planet... Did you notice that Buddhists have the same moral principles as Christians and Jews? - Do not murder, do not steal, do not lie, honor your parents and do not be promiscuous, swayed by desire...

Back to poetry, then. I decided to publish some food-inspired poems after hearing Hilda Weiss read a beautiful poem with these enchanting lines about the evening sky: "...it darkens to blueberry, blackberry, sweet juice of the night..." What a lovely metaphor!  So I thought of publishing these poems together in one post... I also considered the ample pomegranate poems, but then these are for the fall not for the spring, so I'll share them at some other time. 

It is my unique task, in this life, to capture, describe and preserve experiences from my life, and from the complicated lives of my extended family in Poland.  If I do not write it all down, it will be all forgotten... 

ON THE BAKING OF RYE BREAD

I. 

For us, it is all about bread.

It is always about bread. The daily bread.

The sourdough Grandma made in a wooden bowl

baked in a wood-fired oven of dancing flames

and black-sooted pots on concentric metal rings

that could be moved to cover the flames of the stove.

I watched this magic with wide-open eyes

waiting for the bread, hidden far within the dark maws

of the oven until it came out.  Round loaves,

with thick crust around soft warm slices, 

slathered with home-made, melting butter -

add a glass of raw milk, cold from the kanka

chilled in the well overnight - and voila! 

A perfect breakfast, served with the clacking

of storks in the wagon-wheel nest on the pine-top.

The sourdough bowl, a heirloom from great, great, great

grandma, was never washed - a bit of dough left each time 

as starter for the next week's baking of the bread.

II. 

For us, it is all about bread. The rough rye bread 

with bran my Great Grandma baked for her son,

my Mom's uncle, a priest imprisoned in Dachau.

He sent instructions in censored letters with Hitler stamps - 

All is good, so good - each slice to be saturated with lard

in an ugly, sticky mess no thieves would touch.

When guards rifed through packages from home, 

cakes, wheat rolls and treats would disappear, but this? 

Dark bread of survival, fat and rye, kept him alive

through endless experiments on his lungs. 

Was it good luck? Was it bad luck? 

To live unable to breathe without coughing? 

For two decades after five years in hell?

I do not know, I do not read cursive German. 

My aunt showed me his letters last summer. 

Each family, each nation, has its memories of trauma and bliss.

Far in Asia, it is all about rice. Rice paddies, rice paper, 

steaming bowls of plain, unsalted, white rice... 

For us, it is all about bread, the daily bread. 

(c) 2025 by Maja Trochimczyk

This is a new poem based on my own and family memories. In the first part, I conflated the memories of watching my maternal Grandma Maria Wajszczuk mix dough for bread in her "untouchable" breadmaking wooden bowl, kept, with a bit of sourdough starter left in the bowl to continue baking, covered with a linen cloth, in a closed room that kids could not enter. There, jars of preserves were kept - "spizarka." The starter my Grandma used seemed to be as old as the bowl itself, passed on by generations of bread makers.  The bread, baked on Saturday, was to last for a week, two huge round loaves. Later, Grandma used that bowl for making yeast-dough for cakes, and bought bread in the store, so the ancient "starter" sourdough was lost. . . 

The second image, of the stove with iron rings to cover or uncover the flames, was from the home of my paternal Grandma, Nina Trochimczyk. It was my job to keep the temperature of the stove even when cooking strawberry confiture. I had first to start the fire with a sliver of resin-saturated pine wood, and small twigs plus paper, and then to add wooden logs one by one, making sure the fire is neither too large nor too small. Plenty of time for watching the flames! I also loved Grandma Nina's home-made butter and even tried to learn how to beat fresh cream into butter in her wooden box (round vase shape with a beater inside). It was too hard, I gave up after a minute or two. The freshly baked bread for breakfast. There is nothing better! But I hated the warm milk "fresh from the cow" that still smelled of the cow. I enjoyed it only after it was chilled overnight in the well - in a sealed metal container, lowered into water on a chain. Bread and butter with milk - you do not need anything else for breakfast! 

The second poem describes a discovery about family history I made during my 2023 travel to Poland. My Aunt, Barbara Miszta, nee Wajszczuk, my Mom's sister, showed me the family documents she kept, including a stack of over 20 letters from the Concentration Camp in Dachau, written in 1940-1945 by her uncle, my great uncle Feliks Wajszczuk, a Catholic priest first imprisoned in Auschwitz and then in Dachau, along with his cousin Karol, also a priest. 

Father Feliks Wajszczuk was the brother of my Grandpa Stanislaw, and wrote to his mom, my Great Grandma, who baked his bread, dipped each slice in molten lard, and send packages to Dachau. His cousin, Father Karol Leonard Wajszczuk (1887-1942), was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and martyred in Dachau. He was the son of Piotr, the brother of my great grandpa Franciszek Wajszczuk, the chairman of the Trzebieszow village. 

http://www.drelow.siedlce.opoka.org.pl/wajszczuk/meczenstwo_e.htm

I previously mentioned this story of bread, the bread of survival in the title poem of the Rainy Bread collection, added to the volume's second edition, that I kept revising.  

https://moonrisepress.com/trochimczyk---rainy-bread.html

https://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-rainy-bread-poems-from-exile-by.html

After translating it into Polish and presenting it at a conference in Bialystok's Sybir Museum, I published in CSPS Poetry Letter no. 3 of 2024:

https://www.californiastatepoetrysociety.com/2024/10/poetry-letter-no-3-of-2024-autumn-part.html

≡ THE RAINY BREAD ≡

~ for Grandma Nina and Grandma Maria, 

because they baked delicious bread

Even if it softened, it fell into the mud

you need to rinse the slice. When it dries out —

it can be eaten.

And this round, fragrant loaf,

which Grandma baked with sourdough?

One bread loaf for a week — it was the best

with cream and sugar crystals.

And this moist, whole-rye bread baked with honey? 

Delicious with butter and — more honey.

After each bite, take a sip of cold milk.

And the war bread, made from leftover, dirty flour?

Worms removed through a sieve. With bran,

sawdust — even a pebble can be found

among grains of sand. But, there it is.

Finally, the bread from the parcels sent 

to Father Feliks, Mom’s uncle in Dachau.

It’s so ugly — no one would steal it.

Whole rye flour, thick slices saturated with lard — 

Today we know: microelements and calories, 

A guarantee of surviving five years of torture.

Give us today our daily bread —

    the daily bread —

            the rainy bread —

                    the bread of life —

                                      bread

photo by Maja Trochimczyk

On Holy Happiness, Mothers and Good Words for 2025

Giotto, The Nativity fresco, Natività, Date: c.1311 - c.1320

Location: Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Assisi, Italy

It's been a while since I visited the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Assisi, Italy, in 1988 I think... It was during the group pilgrimage led by my Godmother Sister Eia and parish Priest of St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Warsaw. I was so preoccupied with seeing the tiny shed of St. Francis's own chapel placed right in the middle of an enormous and ornate cathedral, so simple and so out of place among all this opulence, that I didn't even notice the amazing frescoes by Giotto. Here, the focus is on the mother and the baby swaddled in white clothes, held up admiringly by her outstretched arms, and adored by a humble cow and a donkey. Two groups of six angels hover inside the stable. St. Joseph's sits, worried ,on the ground in the left corner (well, they have no money, nor a decent place to live in, and the baby is actually not his, so what is he to do?). Another angel tells two frightened shepherds of a large floc of sheep the Good News. Below, in the center, two women wash and dress another, purely human baby without a gold halo of holiness (at first I thought it could have been an earlier scene with Jesus? but this baby has no aureole!). Finally, two choirs of angels hover in the midnight indigo amidst a desolate mountainous landscape. 

Mother Mary raises up her baby and directly looks at her son, without paying attention to either the angels or animals around her.  Madonnas do know something we do not... as I wrote in an old poem, inspired by a different image of a mother and her baby, a Gothic sculpture Madonna of Krużlowa.

Seeing Madonnas at the National Museum

Gothic Madonnas 

with down-cast eyes

demurely

look within—

the infinity of love

spreads out 

the galaxies of laughter

amidst nebulae of bliss

happy overabundance

marks their cheeks

with a half-smile

of knowing

Maja Trochimczyk, published in Into light (2016)

Madonna of Krużlowa from the National Museum, Kraków

The woman and her newborn baby are admired by "dumb animals" and angels first, while people are  too worried, too preoccupied with their own troubles and things, to notice the miracle of birth. Another person entered the world, opening up endless possibilities of creating and changing the world they visited. Thus, the Divine arrives, noticed and cherished first by nonhuman creation and spiritual beings from beyond, but invisible to always too-busy humans.... All these birds singing outside my window since the morning, all the trees stretching their leaves to catch sunlight or dropping them in a flurry of gold and carmine, so the bare trees can go to sleep for the winter. , , 

While Giotto's Nativity does not have a huge ray of light falling onto the baby from the heavens above (see below the drawing by Nicholas Skaldetvind for a modern interpretation of this Orthodox trope), it carries an important message of the enormous significance of mothers, motherhood, giving birth and babies in our word. Without this miracle of human-divine co-creation none of us would be here. The two women bathing and dressing the baby beow express this message ceary. We, all born of mothers, should cherish and appreciate the miracle that motherhood and childbirth are! living in strange times when a good messages are twisted and holy happiness of birth distorted or destroyed

Nativity by Nicholas Skaldetvind 

Even if we are non-Christian and unable to believe in or need "redemption" by Christ, the lamb of God, we are still able to cherish and admire the courage and perseverance of his Mother, who gave birth in a stable, and admired the baby, no matter how poor and displaced they were. The magic of incarnation took place right there and then. There is no reason to look back or forward and be worried by what was or what could be. In this magic moment of welcoming a new life into the world, nothing matters but the present - the baby and the light it brings. 

Timelessness

Yes, there is time

Yes, there is weight

of the rocks on the skin 

of the earth making

it harder to breathe 

for the beast of eons

Yes, there are clouds

Yes, there is air

cut with wispy stripes

of whiteness wishing,

willing itself into being,

into solid forms that 

dissolve in the merest 

breeze, flee into nothing

Yes, there we are

Yes, matter stays

atoms, prions, electrons 

dance in an endless cycle 

of DNA spirals, molecules, 

blades of grass and gravel

Yes, there is time to watch, 

to catch the transient beauty

of living in red harmony 

blood circling in our veins,

rock dust changing into stars

Maja Trochimczyk, from Into light (2016)

My two favorite Christmas tree decorations, lace snow star from Poland 

and a handmade felt poinsettia bloom by my daughter.

To me being born and raised an atheist, though converted to Catholicism at the age of 30, Christmas is the ultimate family and motherhood celebration. It is about mothers, babies, the magic of birth and new life. But also about preparing fantastic feasts at home... it is also quite childish with a the materialistic gifts and Santa stories - we never had those in Poland, no stockings no fireplaces... one gift each at Wigilia dinner on Christmas Eve... But the tree remained with its ornaments and lights at east to February, through the Carnival season, or even all the way to Ash Wednesday, sometime in March, at the true beginning of spring. 

If Jesus was born in the desert town under palm trees, why do we have fir trees for his birthday? That's Christianity in action - adapting to its northern European sites and their landscapes. Snow-stars on my tree and Santa's sled pulled by reindeer also stem from this adaptation. Santa, Mrs. Santa, the elves, the North Pole factory of toys are all quite cute, but while shifting the focus of Christmas away from the baby in the manger and the sweet Mother singing lullabies to accumulating tons of things via chimney delivery we did lose a lot - the focus on the miracle of life experienced in childbirth, and the primacy of the Mother giving birth, in that process. The female Mrs. Santa is just a housemaid, cleaning and serving meals to her tired husband. Mary is the Mother of God, Bogurodzica. Which icon of femininity is better for women to follow and admire?  Yes I do love my Christmas tree and colorful decor on my mantelpiece - but yes, I also have a small nativity scene carved from olive wood in the Holy land....

If we are observant enough, we can see timelessness in the limitations of time. If we are observant enough we can notice all the immense effort by unseen forces to twist and distort meaning of words, of mothers, of motherhood, of babies, of birth...  

Bishop John F. Harrell (also past president and current treasurer of the California State Poetry Society)  captured the problem of words in a brief poem published in the Spring 2017 issue of the California Quarterly. 

Recovering What Is Unclean

The words slip glibly, cleverly from my lips

And I am therefore sure I have won the day;

But my words are like feathers

From a pillow cut open in the wind.

They go off down corridors, paths and highways

On journeys so tortuous and tangled I can never follow.

If the words are true and just, and wise and kind,

I am fine with never knowing where they wander;

But if they are not true and just and wise,

Or especially not kind,

How will I ever snatch the feathers back to me?

John F. Harrell, from California Quarterly, spring 2017.

As John wrote, "The image of the pillow cut open in the wind was told to our class by one of the nuns who taught us the catechism in an old quonset hut at the edge of the bluffs by the Newland House in Huntington Beach back in the 1950's. It's still relevant, I think."  Obviously the meaning is Christian, but I found a similar thought in a non-Christian, spiritual text by Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements. 

These four "agreements with myself" are based on Toltec teachings and summarize the principles of "right living" and proper conduct that so many other commandments, virtue teachings and catechisms capture... If one way does not work, try another, if the door is closed, go through the window...

• Be impeccable with your word
• Do not take anything personally
• Do not make assumptions
• Always do your best

So the four "Words" for the New Year 2025 capture the virtues of courage and moderation, justice and wisdom, or, to express it differently, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. We are talking here of  integrity, fairness, detachment, dedication.  I have written a poem about these virtues in 2007, in a set of poems dedicated to my Franciscan Godmother Elia (as in Elijah, the prophet). 

The Cornerstone of the Soul

Fortitude:

Keep smiling. Grin and bear.

Prudence:

Choose wisely. Think and be there.

Temperance:

Don't take more than your share.

Justice:

Do what's right, what's fair.

The Four Cardinal Virtues:

The cornerstone of the soul.

Once you've mastered the steps,

New ones appear:

Faith: You are not alone . . .

Hope: And all shall be well . . .

Love: Where we are.

From Glorias & Assorted Praises, 2007. https://www.trochimczyk.net/glorias.html

Another  four "Good Words" for the New Year 2025, are found in a newer poem

On Squaring the Circle

It is a simple square that contains the circle —

four ideas, four words —

— Sorry — Forgive — Thank — Love —

No need for explanations, 

long winding roads of words

leading into the arid desert 

of heartless intellect, auras 

of geometric shapes floating above 

your head — a scattered halo 

of squares, sharp-edged cubes

prickly triangles, and hexahedrons

No, not that. Instead let us find 

the cornerstone. Simplicity.

Sorry — to erase the past

Forgive— to open a path into the future

Thank— to suffuse the way, each moment 

with the velvet softness of gratitude

Love — to find a pearl unlike any other,

a jewel of lustrous shine — incomparable, 

dazzling, smooth, pulsating sphere

A dot on the horizon grows

as you, step by step, come closer 

until you enter into the shining

palace without rooms

where inside is outside, 

the circumference is in the point, 

the point in the circumference—

where movement is stillness 

and stillness dances within —

traveling to a myriad planets, 

suns, galaxies, with unheard-of 

velocity, everywhere at once

Love everyone — Respect everything

*     *    * 

So that’s how you square a circle

By Maja Trochimczyk, published in Into Light (2016), reprinted in Altadena Poetry Review (2018)

And since this text started from Nativity and babies, here's the favorite photo of my grandson Adam in 2017 as a baby Santa... and, best wishes

​May your heart be light as a Feather

​May your Smile be bright as the ​Sun

​May your days be sweetened with ​laugher

Happy Holy days of ​loving kindness and fun​!

Not a Halloween Poem - On Emigrants' Pointless Regret

After years of making Halloween costumes for school parades and neighborhood parties, I'm finally free from that misguided celebration of fear and disgust, that ancient opening of the crack between our world and the astral sphere where evil spirits hide to pounce upon us when allowed... Parents and children try to hijack this dark night for some innocent fun — dressing a child as a Pippi Longstocking with her favorite monkey in a Halloween pumpkin suit, or as a pink Piglet with parents in outfits of Winnie the Pooh, the cheerful and stoic, pregnant Mom, and Tigger, the restless, energetic Dad.

When I first came to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with my 8 year old son and an artist husband, we had no money to buy a costume or even the supplies to make one. So I dived into my closet and emerged with a white dress shirt, and white cotton summer pants. There were black garbage bags in the kitchen and black carboard for crafts on the table. So... my son became The Music Man. The black plastic was sturdy enough not to break off easily when I cut out large shapes of music notes and sowed them onto the shirt and the pants in random patterns. The cardboard was also cut into a mask with a round note and a stem. The boy had a small electronic keyboard from his grandparents, so that was tied onto a string and he could play melodies while walking in a school parade. He won the first place, of course. 

There were more costumes later  — a skier, an Arabian sheikh, a water nymph from Adam Mickiewicz's ballade "Switezianka," the cross-dressing lumberjack from Monty Python, the Queen of the Night from Mozart's "Magic Flute" — and, of course the various vampires and ghosts. Even a Swamp Monster, for which tons of colorful autumn leaves were sown onto a brown blanket for the cape, while the teen made his own mask of brown cardboard and leaves. That year, the  school janitor, sweeping the leaves that fell off the cape, was really mad and chased the monster with his broom... But real life in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and later in La Crescenta, California, was far more scary than any Halloween parade...

Not a Halloween Poem

 

Silly, silly, silly me  — what am I

waiting for in this garden, with rusty

finches, golden orioles, and western bluebirds

taking a batch in my crystal bowl?

Year after year I drift further away

on my island of serenity from the solid

continent of my childhood,

from the tall horse chestnut trees

and shiny brown balls that made

armies of little people and herds of tiny

animals, joined by matchsticks —

 

So far away — so silly, silly, silly  —

I am all alone, speaking a foreign language

with a foreign accent — a Slavic

blue-eyed blonde, called here, by ill-willed

strangers — a white orchid —

Yes, silly, silly, silly — oh why, oh why

did I drift towards this land

of incomprehensible weirdness of goblins

ghouls and monsters — Halloween,

the satanic exaggeration of the hideousness

of death — rotten corpses, skeletons

and bloody eye candy — a simulacrum

of cannibalistic rituals. Soulless, hateful matter.

 

Silly, silly, silly me — so out of place

in this country of pretend horrors

and tasteless fun. I’m drifting through time

within an archipelago of lonely islands,

full of exiles, émigrés and D.P.s —

drifting away from my language,

from the skylark’s song above meadows

from the intense halo of candlelight

above each Polish cemetery —

full of chrysanthemum and asters

respect for the dead and nostalgia —

where we walked in the rain,

crunching fallen leaves underfoot

reflecting on mortality and the passing —

 

So — how about you?

Are  you silly, silly, silly, too?

 (c) 2024 by Maja Trochimczyk

What's so scary about the poem, then? When I read it (scribbled in the same morning, with the tea taken in lovely china in lovely, vibrant garden) during our Village Poets monthly gathering, ominous silence fell and the listeners looked at me with horror. I must have really scared them  — was it the "white orchid" insult that I had to bear from someone with a different skin tone and a much darker heart. Or was it the outspoken expression of displacement and alienation felt by someone who "drifted away from home" that's no longer there... https://chopinwithcherries.blogspot.com/2024/06/on-loss-and-homecoming-facsimile-of.html. 

One poet came over and said, "you must really want to go back home." She did not understand that there is no going back, no home... my childhood home was erased from existence when the street was widened by adding another lane and the fire station across was not to be moved, even though it was the only building surrounded by fields of potatoes. Instead a whole row of pretty little houses with their pretty little cherry trees, raspberry and currant bushes, narcissus and roses was mercilessly taken out. There is a bus stop there now, and a wide, cement sidewalk... though the alley through the neighborhood, much narrower than remembered, remains... and other residents kept their meticulously cared for gardens and homes.

Trzebieszow cemetery, May 2024. All the tall chestnuts and maples were cut down after one fell onto the roof of the chapel in the wind...

Orthodox cemetery in Warsaw, Wola district, tombstone for my parents, Henryka i Aleksy Trochimczyk

An angel kneels nearby...

Tombstone for my paternal grandparents, Wincenty and Nina Trochimczyk, with the name of my Dad added too, in good measure. Grodek Bialostocki cemetery. September 2024.

This year, when I went back to Poland twice (in the past I even had an eight-year gap, I do not go that often), I had a chance of visiting the graves of my extended family - my maternal grandparents and great grandma in May and my paternal grandparents, uncle and great grandparents in September. We even drove through the fields where my great grandparents lived and I found out from my cousins whom I did not see for 12 years that my great grandpa Andrei or Andrzej Niegierysz was Belorussian not Ukrainian and had two wives: the first died after giving birth to five children, so he remarried, left his estate near Ukrainian border to them and bought another 200 acres of land further north, in Mieleszki, leaving that farm to his five new children from his second wife, Maria. 

(So, my name was not only after my maternal grandma Maria, but also after my paternal great grandma, also Maria. I do not regret changing it to my nickname Maja after suffering the mispronunciation of this name as three-syllable "Ma-ri-ia" as if I was a heroine from Bernstein's West Side Story or the real Mary Mother of God... )

Tombstone of my great grandparents Andrzej and Maria Niegierysz 

My grandma Nina was the youngest of their five children and married a "local" man Wincenty who loved land and spent his time buying more until he owned 60 acres. But he loved hunting too much, and got a cold that turned into pneumonia and died in 1939... making my Grandma a young widow, raising two sons alone on her estate. 

Before visiting the cemetery, I walked on that sandy road leading to my great grandpa's house. I also visited the home of my Dad's cousin, daughter of his aunt, now in her 90s, happily spending time alone in a house stuck in the fields in the middle of nowhere... Only enormous sky above, fields and scattered bunches of birches and pines on the horizon...

Turn right and you'll visit my great grandparents homestead in Mieleszki, 

10 km from Belarussian border.

View from my Dad's cousin yard facing fields now planted with corn not rye, and copses of trees.

I went to my grandma's empty house, with overgrown yard of weeds, not kept in check by livestock, like sheep and geese, the latter were especially adept at trimming the lawns to desirable proportions.  The old linden tree was there... I have not written any poems yet, the emotions are too complex still... but some haiku will appear in the Southern Haiku Study Group anthology.  Here's just one that was not chosen.

Grandma's empty house - 

wind carries dry birch leaves, 

scattered, like family

Yet, my favorite, old linden tree, that was all buzzing with bees in July, the month of the blooming linden trees ("lipiec" from "lipa") was still there. I used to sit in its shade with my Uncle who was carving wooden boats from bark of nearby pine trees, lining the sandy road next to the house... 

The yard is full of weeds and bushes, the wooden fence covered with lichen... Yet the golden dome of the cerkiew still shines on the horizon, built on a hill in Grodek Bialostocki, in such a way that it is visible from every village from miles away... My phone camera was not good enough to capture its distant brilliance... 

a beacon of faith -

distant, gold church dome 

shines above rye fields

Actually, these are no longer rye but corn, and the characteristic haystacks with wooden roofs are also gone, replaced by ugly bales of hay wrapped in plastic. Yes, it was a lot more work to "make hay" so it would not get wet in the rain and dried properly for winter feed. But it was a lot more fun to play on hay inside the barn, so fragrant with clover and dried wildflowers... and the landscape was lovelier too. Not all progress is progress, really. Faster, bigger, richer  - and for what? 

The lichen-covered wooden gate...

The wooden beams interkocking without nails at the corner. 

Grandma used to lock the door and leave the key on one of these beams. You locked the door so it would not blow open in a gust of wind, everyone left their keys by the door - there were so few people around in these fields and forests...

Grandparents' wedding photo has tiny photos of Janek my cousin during his mandatory military service, and me in high school, still with short hair, stuck in the corner...

Sunset above the fields in Bielewicze.