By Admin1 (admin) (151.196.44.226) on Thursday, May 06, 2004 - 4:49 pm: Edit Post |
Peace Corps Volunteer Nicole Sheets' Meeting with Moldovan ‘bunica’ brings appreciation for her skills
Peace Corps Volunteer Nicole Sheets' Meeting with Moldovan ‘bunica’ brings appreciation for her skills
Meeting with Moldovan ‘bunica’ brings appreciation for her skills
By NICOLE SHEETS - Moldova column
I recently met my Moldovan grandmother for the first time.
"You’re skinny," she said after we were introduced.
On a visit last month to my host family in Mitoc, the village where I spent my first three months in Moldova, bunica (Romanian for grandmother) had camped out in a chair bed in the kitchen. She hails from Donduseni, a town in northern Moldova, but after some heart trouble she decided to stay with her daughter, my host mom, for a time. By the time I got to Mitoc, though, she spoke often of wanting to get back home.
Bunica gave me a pair of house slippers she’d knitted herself, cozy and beige and the perfect fit (Mama Nina had warned her that my feet are a little bigger than most Moldovan girls’). I put them on and wiggled my toes. "Wear them in health," she said, happy that I liked them.
Bunica’s long gray hair dangled in a thin ponytail. Most of the time, she wore a housecoat that zips in front, made out of something soft like velour. She could move slowly around the kitchen and once even up the stairs for Sunday dinner in the casa mare -- a room reserved for entertaining guests with a loaded table.
Mostly, though, bunica stayed put on her bed, staring out the window, chatting a little with me or anyone else in the kitchen.
On Saturday night, a pile of fresh fish from the Mitoc lake appeared in the kitchen. The fish twitched and breakdanced in their plastic tub. They mouthed their dying words in a fish language I couldn’t quite make out.
Without skipping a beat, bunica pulled a stool closer. She removed her glasses from their Christian Dior case, securing with a white elastic band the round owlish lenses with their beat-up frames. Then bunica proceeded to scrape the scales off each fish with a kitchen knife, their struggling no match for bunica’s sure, meaty hands.
Fish by fish, the tub quieted. Scales glittered like sequins on the floor. I bent down to observe bunica’s technique, putting my eyesight in peril as a feisty fish let rip the muscular curl of its body, sending scales flying in my direction.
Bunica gutted the whole lot and put her knife away. The next morning the fish reappeared at breakfast, whole, breaded, fried and stacked like fat envelopes waiting to be opened.
Nicole Sheets is a Barboursville native and Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova. Her e-mail address is moldovanicole@yahoo.com. Her column appears on the Life page the first Sunday of each month.