Peace Corps Volunteer Nicole Sheets says Moldovan village offers sweet delights for city folk
Moldovan village offers sweet delights for city folk
In Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, I’ve become something of a city girl. The village, for me, is a vacation: a place to rest, take walks, eat mounds of food somebody’s mother cooks. These days, it’s also a place to devour the cherries dangling ripe in the trees.
My friend Valery recently invited me to her family’s country house in Milesti, a village not far from the Romanian border. The hills near Milesti are a little more pronounced than in other parts of Moldova. Near the village, our minibus slowed to a steep downhill crawl, dodging potholes.
Valery’s mother had prepared pinwheels of cheese-filled pastries, or placinte, the size of my head. Her father filled a pitcher with homemade wine so dark it turned our teeth purple.
Outside, I admired the roses in bloom and the rows of grapevines, their fruit no more than pale green pinpoints soaking up sun all summer until the autumn harvest.
I eyed a big hen. Chicks crowded under her plump pillow of a body as she eyed me back. A dog called Lucky, the size of a small horse, barked every time I trekked near the outhouse.
We walked on the hillsides, looking for fragi, tiny wild strawberries. From far away, we saw a child in a bright red sweater and joked that he, too, looked like a baby strawberry.
Mostly, though, we gorged on cherries from the trees out back. In the late morning, we’d eat so much fruit we couldn’t see straight, but then after a hearty nap, we’d all eagerly return to the trees. Romanian has two words for cherries: visine, sour cherries, and chireshe, for the sweeter ones. Valery’s dad had experimented with a hybrid, "a new cherry for an old mouth," he called it, laughing. This lighter cherry was tasty enough, but I still preferred the original version.
Valery’s two younger sisters intrepidly climbed the trees, bending the branches downward, all our nimble fingers picking the dark sweet beads. The youngest sister claimed that even with a broken arm one summer she had climbed the cherry trees.
I climbed to the first part of the tree but then panicked and jumped back down. I felt scared to climb the tree. I felt scared to ride the bicycle down the hill from the wild strawberry patch. I just wanted my feet on the ground, my hands in the branches.
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.
