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Homestead.org in the Former Soviet Union continued, page 7

Picking Prussian Peas

I guess I fell asleep there for a few minutes because when I woke up, O. told me that Tolya had thought my snoring was even funnier than my phobia of heights, and he was now industriously engaged in picking tomatoes while I was looking like the town drunk.

Well, before we’d come out here, Tanya had said that they didn’t have much work left in the dacha and basically we would be coming here for the shashlick.  Typically, I had believed her, especially when they’d started lunch and drinks without having done any work at all.

In fact, now, post-vino I’d been dreading just the walk back to the train.  I kicked myself for not realizing that they’d never want to leave ripe food on the vines.

Well, where I come from, alcohol and ambition do not frequent the same locales, so what came next required quite a tussle for my work-ethic.  Tanya said we were guests and to sit back and relax, but I said that I wasn’t – sigh –  brought up like that, and so demanded to be of some service, the many glasses of wine be damned.

She set me to helping her pick dried peas which I did, and helped her shell them afterward.

When the work was done, Tolya called one of the dacha owners a few fences down and ask him to take our photograph, so we posed  for a while as I tried not to yawn when the shutter was being opened.

Eventually, it was time to catch the train back to town, so we loaded up perhaps as much as two bushels of tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers and squash and struck out back up the trail from whence we’d come.

On the way back, we took another fork in the road which took us through the village this time, for my benefit.  Tolya was pulling a small wheeled basket O. had given him and he chose to stay on the main path because it was better, smoother road.

The road going AROUND the village is better than the one going through it? I thought to myself that this was a little strange, and sure enough it turned out to be true.

Frankly, the village was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, although I suspect it would have been pretty similar to rural American villages prior to the widespread use of the automobile.   

There was a main street about 75 feet wide, but the tracks were either deep ruts covered with grass, or detours around the deep ruts, which were also covered with grass.  There was absolutely no sign that a car had been down this lane in weeks, maybe months, nor even evidence that any of the horse-drawn wagons parked about had.  In fact, the only sign of any sort of traffic at all was a foot-path,   As chickens scratched in the middle of the road and a small boy peered out of one of the sheds lining the “street” we made our way along.  Olia stopped at a hand-dug well just to one side of the road and proceeded to lower the bucket on its rope.  I thought this was maybe a little pushy and asked her if the owner of the well wouldn’t want to have something to say about who used it.

I guess I forgot where I was.

O. patiently explained to “her alien” (she's been calling me that since the government-mandated insurance office called up and asked her to bring her alien down for registration) that the well belonged to everyone and pointed out three more wells up the road..

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