The Cow-Minder

In Chizatau nature has been taking over the river bed. Herons, egrets and wild ducks fly from place to place. Plenty of clam shells can be seen by the water. If one looks closely enough, they are holes in their shells and are filled with mud, which is proves that they were eaten by birds. The grass is full of bees. Dragon files and small blue butterflies zoom ahead as I walk by.

The only person I see there regularly is the cow-minder. It would be silly to call him a cowboy because he is in his mid sixties. He considers himself too old to leave Chizatau. He earns a hundred lei per month per cow + food, and leaves home early in the morning and walks the river bed with the cows until 7 p.m. The cows lead.  There are nine of them. They eat grass, rest at mid day, go in the water to cool off and wash, and then walk back home. Each of them has a different personality. He said only the smallest one is lazy and naughty.  The rest listen to him, love to be clean and cannot stand even a speck of dirt. They wash several times a day.

He is not the only one who walks the river bed. There is another old man I see from time to time. He has the luxury of guarding his own cows, and is not always there at a fixed time. He stays under a tree and reads his bible while his cows graze. Then there are the shepherds. They stop at the same place as the nine cows at mid day with their sheep and chat and sometimes share food.

The cow minder tells me he has two sons, but they visit rarely. One chose badly when he married a girl he met in a dicotheque. They had a daughter together who is sixteen and very big and tall. She seems to posses no other qualities in his eyes. He has since divorced his wife and moved to Germany for work, but does not save much money because he smokes and that's expensive. The other son works in Lugoj - the nearby city - and has two younger children. They like to be on their phones and tablets and don't have time to visit a grandfather in a small village a little more more than 15 km away or help with house chores. 

When I was growing up, the river bank in Chizatau was almost white with geese and full of laughing children. They were so many that together with cows and other forms of livestock they managed to stop me from swimming. Today the geese are gone. I've seen only one lonely goose in somebody's yard.

The cow minder himself had had a wife. She died when their children were about the same age as mine crushed under concrete. She worked at making marble, and one day the concrete mixer was broken. She was told to hit it with a shovel to get it to restart. When she did so, it fell on her and crushed her. So, the cow minder raised his boys alone and let them splash in the Bega river where they learned to swim on their own. He was not a cow minder then because Chizatau had a Cooperative and made concrete, bricks and marble. It was a busy place.

It's interesting that now nature is taking over without fancy intervention programs. Most people have moved to the city or abroad, and the ones who are left spend their time on tablets and computers and let wild life grow not because they support it but because they are too addicted to technology to do anything else. There are few farm animals other than the cows, and some sheep. Most people keep dogs and they are confined to their yard. There are no geese or ducks or children on the roads. The only noise is from cars and trucks because Chizatau is on the main county road from Timisoara to Lugoj.

This year has been strange. Summer came in late March right after snow and it stayed warm and rainy. It rained every 2-3 days and plants, grass and trees grew. There were no storms here as of yet or wild-fires. The fruits and vegetables riped quickly or went bad because of the rain. The only thing that grew in our garden are pumpkins - lots of them - and grapes.

The rest of the world is warming up.  Even the UK, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark have had a long hot summer this year. Sweden highest peak melted by 13 feet in the month of July. The Swiss military is wearing shorts and T-shirts. The wild-fires have reached the Artic circle.  California and Greece have lost people to fires and plenty of houses.

July in April

Summer arrived after winter this year. It snowed at the end of March because the polar vortex, which is  a wall of wind that circulates the air at the poles, split and could not push the warm air away from the Arctic.  So, in February and March it was warmer at the North Pole than in Rome. Now that the snow is gone, every day the temperature is close to 30 C. My children comment on the weather from time to time. Since they are the future, I am briefly recording what they say.

Edward: "Everything will ripe fast and in the same time because it's so hot. Then most humans will disappear. It's like in Jules Verne's book". 

Edward: "I like Jules Verne because nobody important dies in his books. In this one he only kills most of humanity, and some stranded English soldiers."

[Edward is 7. We've been reading "Hector Servadac" -- it's our 5th Jules Verne book to date.  The children call it Hector SavesADuck because it's funnier to say.  The protagonist is stranded on part of Earth that travels through the solar system on top of a hard-core comet, which somehow has an atmosphere. It gets closer to the Sun and heats up and then further away and everything freezes.  We have not reached  the end yet.  I do believe that they return to Earth in another close encounter and everyone important lives happily ever after -- not the English, of course. The English float away on another piece of the comet because they are too proud to work with the French, the Spanish and the Russians  + one Italian girl (20some total) even when there is literally nobody else left. We were disappointed to find that Hector does not save any ducks - only the non-English people and a pigeon.]

David:" Will Romania become a desert? will it be like California or Sahara? how long will desertification take? a year or two or will it be decades?"

[David is 11. He asks lots of question to which I don't have an answer. I keep telling him that to avoid desertification we'd have to keep existent forests and plant a lot more trees. We could count all the trees and stop cutting them, but our governments are formed from people who are too old to care.  When/if this changes, will we be able to change enough to avoid major disasters? I am not sure.]

[I am not ungrateful. I am thankful for warmth. We visited England in the beginning of April and it was rainy and chilly almost every day. But I also know that hurricanes get strong quicker when the ocean is warm, and that harsher storms are expected to come. I raise three little boys, and I worry: will they grow up? will they be safe? am I doing enough to help them prepare for whatever lies ahead?]

La multi ani!

I am thankful for the wonderful women in my life. I primarily thank my mother. She has always been there for me -- helping and supporting me in everything I have done or tried to do until now. It's been a hard year for her, and I am so grateful she is still able to handle it all. I've always thought that if there were angels on this Earth they'd be like her, and like my grandma had once been.  On the left is a picture of Edward with the paper roses he built for me for mother's day under the guidance of his teacher -- another strong woman who works very hard to teach them all she knows. The roses are amazingly beautiful. On the right is Silkie, our hen. One of the chickens she raised this summer is lame. This evening she seemed to help her and keep her company even though the chicken is now a grown hen. 

My children are growing up so quickly, it's hard to keep up. Edward is first to wake up when the alarm rings. He actually gets up and gets dressed instead of turning it off and going back to bed. He gets to school on time and wants to be there every day to not miss out. They even have fancy shirts now that they wear  for end of year plays in school and when they go to the theatre, and look so grown-up in them. As much as I complain and try to get them to do more around the house and to do they homework on time, I hope they'll manage to stay happy and care-free for a little longer. That's partly why I've hanged on to our little zoo and refused to move out to yet another country.

Below are some pictures of my mother, Edward and David from before the winter. We are all eagerly waiting for more sun.

 

David's letter

On mother day, all children in David's class were asked to write a letter to their mother. This is David's. I translated it from Romanian.

Dear mother,

I would like to see you as soon as possible. How are you and Danny and the rest? what's new there?

We have 2 goats, I don't know how-many chicken, 2 ducks and a quail.

Last summer there was a great storm. We had to change the tiles on the roof. I believe it's because of global warming. I heard there were fires in California. Did you have any storms?

I heard the ice is melting. This means the ground could go up or down by as much as 50 m in some places, which is not a problem other that California and other parts of Earth will go under the sea level and sink.

David

He genuinely shows the approach we all take. Yeah, the ice is melting, no big deal, CA and other places might sink. Move on to doing whatever we do every day.  Note his mother lives in CA.

So many forests are cut, our politicians deny global warming AND promote work that increases carbon emissions. Somehow there is nothing we do to stop this cycle. Like with the war in Syria and with the refugees, we read the news, ignore and move on. Since the water is warm, there are bound to be stronger storms and more extreme temperatures. I wonder how bad it will get.  We are trapped in virtual reality (the internet, money, random stupid paperwork) and as we become more and more disconnected from the world we live in, it's becoming extremely hard to make changes that have impact in the real world.

But the letter is simpler than my grumbling. David misses his mother. He would very much like to see her and Danny (his brother), and he worries that the part of the world she lives in will get destroyed. I told him climate change takes time and that CA will not get to be underwater any time soon.