Categories: First childhood memory, Galina Ivaschenko

Well, I am Ivaschenko Galina Ivanauna. I was born in nineteen twenty seven, on the sixteenth of April. In Minsk Oblast, Kruhlyany region, Shepelevichy village council. The name of our village was Kazyol .Yes; it has such an interesting name Kazyol. I don’t know the origin of this name, so I cannot say why it is called like this. We had a very picturesque landscape. The location was very beautiful. There was a forest near it, there was a cranberry bog there. There was a flood plain – it flooded in spring. There was a small river, but in spring it flooded very much. There were miscellaneous herbs there: lots of flowers on the meadow. When we were small girls we ran and made such small bouquets… We took them home and put them into the glass. In general, it was a nice place.

Not far from our place there was … to what distance, I don’t know truly, but there was a distance of five-seven kilometers from our place, there was a pine forest there. The pines were very tall; one had to throw back one’s head to see the tree head waving high. And in summer the pine body is very-very flat and beautiful and is glinting in the sun. And at the bottom there was brushwood of the leaf forest. Well, there were bushes, nut-trees, some other trees… I even don’t know the names of them, but they were not very tall, but they grew below. The pines were up, and this was … They were called must pines. There was a time when they were hewed down and taken for ship musts. This forest gave us lots of things. For example, we went there together with our parents, I was very young then, I was six or seven years old. But I already went there with my mother to pick blueberries. There were lots of blueberries there. My mother took such a big basket, it could hold sixteen kilos. When we dag out potatoes we put them in it. Until we filled in the basket, we wouldn’t return home. All the girls went to pick berries, there were three of us. The elder sister was born in 1922, Olga born in 1925, and me born in 1927. So we picked together. Well, we had such cups with a handle called here in Belarus «kubachki». I filled it and ran quickly to put into the basket, again I filled it and … so this way we got the basket full of blueberries. My mother dried them, jammed them, so in short, we had a delicacy in winter. We had lots of nuts, but I don’t know, I didn’t go to pick nuts. So we picked matured nuts for winter, and it was a delicacy too. We used to sit on the furnace; we were given nuts and a hammer. There was a special hole we put a nut into and hammered it and eat a nutmeat. It was very good too. Well. And naturally, this is how we lived.

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Researcher: Natalya Ivaschenko, PhD (Historical Sciences), associated professor at Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno, Kseniya Adasik, Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno