Talking with my mother, talking about my first home!
I was only six when we left Slovakia, and the mountains where I was born, to live in the port city of Odesa in Ukraine. I hardly have any memories of that life. I was fortunate, that for every year until I was twenty we went home for a mid-Spring holiday to stay with my grandparents (one year my father's parents, the next year my mother's parents) in the high mountains, and I am reminded of the smell of the house, the wooden walls, we had wooden interior walls, and cold stone exterior walls to the house. It was clad with wood which is so much warmer and alive.
I have a photo of me inside the house when I was very young. It is evocative, but the dredging of my memory is more and more difficult as I get older, every year adds another layer to the gritty recollection. I so want to go home to Slovakia to see my family there, but yet, with Fico's view of the Russian menage, I am dissuaded, for fear of misunderstanding, with the government looking at the Russo-Ukraine war in a different 'truth' than I have experienced it.
When I came out of hospital, after the explosion, my mother thought for us to stay in our home village, but something made her and my aunt take me to Berlin instead. My Dad approved of their actions too, so going home was not the better option it was apparent then, as it remains now. I have no doubts of either of my parents! How they see the war and Putin is how I see it, and have experienced it myself, between those two buildings with my friends. I am never likely to see the way Putin wants us to see, in the battle of hearts and minds that he fights even in Russia!
