Morning.

Four times of the Day

Morning, Day, Evening, Night

(reminiscences from the Droszków village - Spring 2009)

I woke up... I opened my eyes, I looked around..., I noticed the slightly visible, well known outlines of the table, the chairs, the tiled stove, in the corner, the windows, and a clock, hanging between them, on the wall. It showed 5 o' clock. Just a while ago, I have not been here. Only the body was lying, deep in sleep. Where I had been, before I woke up... ?

I got up, I touched the floor, with the bare feet. Its chill has momentarily dispelled the remaining of the night dreams, and it brought me back to Reality. OK, I wandered somewhere before, I had some aim, I was not alone... With some effort, I tried to remember the history from behind the wall...

I came up to the stove. It was still warm. I leaned on it, and I felt all the swarm of thermal small needles, suddenly penetrating the naked body. The morning cafe was already being brewed, on the table, beside. The silence, not even slight marmor. I listen carefully and I do not know, if I listen into the presence of here and now, or the presence which has passed a while ago, as If I wanted to hear something...

Yes,... it is time to go out and greet a new day. I put on warm clothes, as after all, this is the time, when mornings are already cold . I went out, with my coffee outside of the house, I sat down, on the small bench, quasi-bench in fact, as it was made of two stumps and a board, placed down horizontally on them. I got a breath of fresh cold, crispy air, then a single draught of coffee, I lit a cigarette, and I looked into and listened into the morning, emerging out of the gloominess. Everything was asleep, but the Night was closing her eyes rather slowly. 

The sky became pale and, with every moment, it was losing the intensity of the night's scenery. From the just a few houses, the remaining of the dreams evaporate; dreams most distinct and weird. They flee away, together with bats of the night frolic, somewhere behind the mountains, and maybe into the cosmic sphere, mysterious, accompanying the vanishing Stars. And all this, in the majesty of the silence, intensified by the brook, muttering nearby, by the locals called Doroszówka.

The Sun still somewhere behind the mountains. The slopes of Dranica enveloped by the grey mist, so that only the top hill spruce trees stay distinctively silhouetted against the pale Sky. While the meadows at the brook have been covered with the silver vesture. Imperceptibly, it becomes more and more bright. In this calmness, of the waking up day, I heard the first, sparse voices of birds. The air, swelled with the Spring's "waking-up", is crispy and cold. The wind, which often blows here, got lost somewhere, so that the limbs of the trees remain unmoved, unaffected, still without leafs, but already with buds. Soon, they will wake up and will fill in the space between them. I sat very silently, all of me embedded into this morning scenery...

More and more bird voices emerged... And so, this way, the morning concert began, for many voices. Within the more distant and closer perspective, still new voices emerged, some just making a background, others, being a singular solo show; while the space, present all around, has carried them through all the valley. Delicate..., subtle trilliums.., moved from the foreground to the secondary one, pure..., with no falsehood.., they carried themselves somewhere, far, over there, ... somewhere where a woodpecker and buzzard can be heard, and maybe also a goshawk, circling high in the sky, and making its characteristic groans. The time has stopped... The mystery of the everyday morning, the religious service, in which I have been a participant, and maybe also somebody else, I do not know. I kept silent, I listened and looked around... Finally, somewhere near the mountain top of Dranica, the first sunbeam flashed, it dropped here for a while, and soon after all the Sun started to haul out, from behind the mountain....

I got lost in thought... 

A small village, located in the valley, surrounded  from all three sides with the mountain slopes, from which a brook has drained, flowing through it, and having its supremacy above it, with the mountain top, Ptasznik; this is Droszków village. Such is an original name, however there are some, who call it Droszów. Located at the borders of this country, in the Kłodzko Valley, invisible for all the Earth, for the Cosmos not even constituting a dust. Some time ago, for sure, more deep in past, than half a Century ago, it was a big village; today it is hard to determine what is its character. Still not long ago, five, ten years ago, there were several households here, cows pasturing in the meadows, horse rigs going along the ways, reapers peening their scythes. Life moved on, outside, out of doors, among the meadows and the mountains.    

Today this place is vacant, old houses with their farm buildings, abandoned, they fall into ruin, or they already have not been existent; a few, being rescued, change the character of their purpose. Some are quite new, from quite "different epoque", and the people who live here, everyday come to their work with their cars, to the small city nearby. There are, so far, not many of them.  For how long this small quasi village will remain like that, depends on its inhabitants. How many new incomers will appear here,  how many houses will grow, thanks to the modern technologies, whether there will occur a real traffic, on this one and only way, which you find here? If the municipal customs will arrive and govern here; the customs, which already have slipped in, unnoticed - it is all hard to say, but there is a great danger of it.

It is already today, that the modern limousines pass Droszków, the trees become cumbersome, and thus they must be cut off; you will see no reapers with scythes... Now, from Spring to Autumn, mowing is being done with reaping machines, with internal combustion engines, which makes a lot of noise, and this reaping is not done for any good cause, but to win the first place, in the contest for the most beautiful village, with other villages, for the sake of a prize of little value in fact.

If things will look so any further, then Droszków will stop being a small, quiet, quasi village, lost somewhere in the World. There are many such places, they are practically everywhere. Somewhere, the Man has lost the sense of his being, giving himself into the captivity of Modern Reality...

But coming back to the Today, when I sat so on the small quasi bench, in the front of the house, I finally felt the chill of the morning on myself, so I got up and went back to the chamber.   

 

 

October 2009

Author: Leszek Wieliczko 

 Translated by: Agnieszka Zell