Old Country Ways

As a child, I was always around when my parents had visitors or when they were visiting. I thought it was because I was so mature and wise that adults enjoyed having me around. It was later in life that I realized that the reason I got so many opportunities to spend with my parents and their friends is that, well, where else would I be? There were no babysitters so if my parents went out, I went out as well. And if they were at our home, I think that perhaps I may have just refused to go to bed on my own and rather than argue with me, they just let me stay up.

As I reflect on those times, and I do often, I realize how much I loved those times. My parents' friends were all from the "old country" as they would say, and conversations were in Polish, Ukranian, Russian or Czeck. I listened to all the stories about survival despite countless hardships. As a young girl of ten, I remember having a dream about war that was so vivid that I was baffled. I had seen no photographs or movies so I wondered how I knew what war would look like. In was several years later I decided it was because the stories were so descriptive that I needed no photographs.

Of course, food was another perk of these evenings. There was always delcious food. It seemed if you came from the "old country", you were a good cook. There was always baked goods or canned fruit, and if the timing was right, home made sausage! Some of the recipes I have been able to recreate but the stories are getting dimmer and dimmer every year. Oh, how I wish that someone would have recorded these stories. What a great book that would have been!