Just me
was much better than first sex, of course. I was 14 and a half and completely smitten with my blue-eyed classmate. And certain that he was in love with the blonde, green eyed and very conscious diva of our class. And I was a tomboy. So we were – just friends. In spring, rumour had …
First 6th of February without grandma –She’d always be the first to congratulate me. When I think of her, my memories circle around the smell of freshly ironed whites. Cleanliness with a subtle scent of lavender.
Wintertime, 1990. Almost a year had passed since – what we thought was – the Revolution. Our ski camp group was invited to go to Switzerland! Around 20 kids and 3 instructors, we got invited by a lovely lady who had fled Romania in the 80es. We were going to Sion, Valais, and were going …
The nineties were so much like the dull grey power suits that they spawned. Stiff and unadventurous they seemed, but my, what was hiding beneath that rough fabric! Linda Evangelista and the super models. These big lipped men, Jagger and Tyler, always a cigarette sticking out of somewhere. New borders defined the East and the West; still some fear loomed in …
When I was growing up, this roof had bright orange tiles. Two old sisters and their little black Pomeranian mongrel lived under it. Through open windows you could hear an old hag downstairs eternally cursing at her grandson. While out there in the city centre big demolitions carried whole neighbourhoods off, here in the north …
I miss you so much sometimes. Even though next May it’ll be 25 years since that Wednesday afternoon when I said, “Let’s skip school and go bathe in the lake instead!” But I stayed on the shore and you went out swimming and never came back. I just waited there and I couldn’t believe it. …
Back in the eighties when I was a kid, my originally Swiss great grandma lived in the ground floor of our house. Together we’d bake these wonderful Christmas cookies “from home”, as she said. First she’d roam around the markets for a few days and obtained some eggs, some flour, margarine and sugar. Sometimes she’d …
…or how we spent the revolution/coup d’état. My memories of those days of Christmas 1989 are somewhat blurred. I remember there were rumours of unrest in the streets of Timișoara. A support rally for the communist party was organised in Bucharest. Sometime before Christmas Eve, the phone rang: dad was called to go “protect the …
Great-grandma had come from Switzerland to Romania in 1927 as a trained nanny for children with disabilities. Among the things which she attempted to reconstruct in her new country that’d remind her of home was a typically Swiss garden: with flowerbeds and gravel roads, bergenia, violets, tulips, periwinkle, hydrangea, forsythia, rose-beds and an ivy-covered fence. …
Before 1989 we were taught in school about how the incredibly cruel bourgeois landowners had enslaved and tortured the peasants. I knew that in the old times grandma had owned some land and a horse. It was therefore hard to imagine the most sweet-natured person I knew mistreat any living being, let alone another fellow …