In the summer I often went from our village to my grandmother’s. She lived only seven kilometers away and I could get to her very quickly by bicycle. The road was bumpy and it was not always necessary to ride on the asphalt, so I liked to think of such trips as a real journey – on the right there was a wheat field, on the left there was a river, sunflower heads were seen in the distance… I had to ride on the boulders there, to wade through the sand on foot, like on the beaches, and somewhere I had to cross a narrow wooden bridge and not to fall in the water.
In winter, of course, it was impossible to get to my grandmother by bicycle, and my dad and I used to go to her by car, until at the end of December a real snowstorm fell on our villages. In the evening it sprinkled the frozen ground beautifully, and in the morning it had already fallen more than knee-deep. My parents had to clear the path from the house to the gate all day.
I was fascinated by the amount of snow shining in the light, but Dad was nervous for some reason.
– Mom hadn’t been well last night. Bad weather and her blood pressure skyrocketed, and we didn’t have time to get her pills. We kept putting it off and putting it off…
My mother insisted that my father and I drove to her mother-in-law’s house and brought her the necessary medicine, but the roads were snow-covered and the car could not pass. The village could only be cleared by their own people with carts, and who would do that when the clouds were gathering in the sky again and it was already snowing?
My father and I had to put on some warm clothes, take a backpack and a sled, just in case I got tired and it would not be difficult for my father to carry me, and set off on our “long journey”.
It was the best trip of my life! Daddy and I breathed hard through the snow, played word games, drank sweet-sweet tea from a thermos, and ate the meat sandwiches that Mom had packed for us. The two of us had red cheeks because the frost was pinching them mercilessly, and two pairs of mittens each.
We got to Grandma toward evening. She wasn’t expecting us at all and wondered how it was that we managed to walk so much in the gathering snowstorm.
– We walked all this way for you,” I bragged.
Grandma was as excited about the pill refill as she was about our presence. After contacting my mother, we said that we would stay at Grandma’s for the night, and then all night we ate pies from the stove and lay on this very stove, warming our frozen limbs. I stared at the peeling ceiling and thought that there would never be a better winter than this one.
