The Park Crew Setting the First Bird Panel

Nancy, Karen & Susie in Poienile Izei, Maramures County

Visitors

Visitors


There are many options for me to write about this time, including a day out harvesting a field of corn by hand, and Nancy’s successful project to install bird houses, feeders and explanation panels in the parcul centru in Cluj, but I think instead that I’d like to write about our visitors this summer and fall.

A few days ago we sent Susie and Rich off to Budapest, Vienna and Prague. They had been with us for a week and we’d toured Cluj and Maramures in that time. Susie is Nancy’s close cousin and Rich is her husband. Rich himself had been in the Peace Corps thirty or more years ago in Africa. They are both active in the returned Peace Corps volunteer group at the home in Rochester, N.Y.

In August my niece and her new husband Mathew made it here for a visit. They were celebrating a postponed honeymoon with a tour of parts of Europe and included us on their itinerary. The first of July my brother Joe and wife Harriet were here for a short stay. We accompanied them on roughly the same tour of the region of Maramures as we this month made with Susie and Rich.

In June we traveled to Budapest to meet with Lennie and Mary Lou, friends from Harrisonburg. They did not have the extra time to get to Cluj but it was good for us to get away ourselves to see the Hungarian capitol. When we were there it seems such a pleasant and peaceful place, hardly the center of turmoil and political confusion that has filled the television recently.

Our apartment here in Cluj is fairly large by Peace Corps standards and the city is a railway hub so we have also hosted a number of volunteers as they come through town. We have a pull out couch, and those of you who have slept on it know that it’s not the best, but otherwise the accommodations are pretty good. Breakfast often is included in our hospitality and that can mean peanut butter toast and Nancy’s homemade granola. I’ve kept a log book of our overnight visitors and in the year we’ve been in our apartment we’re up to 28 different guests – that counts Linda, our most often housemate only once. Perhaps we should open a bed and breakfast when we get home. I know that if we’d have stay out in the village of Luna de Sus where we were stationed for our first two months here at site, we might not have seen anybody.

It’s nice to have the visitors from America. One reason is that they bring us things we can’t find here, but mostly it is good to know that family and friends have gone to the expense and effort to come to a corner of the world that ranks somewhere below the usual tourists destinations. Parts of Romania are a beautiful places and we love to show them off, but we also know that London, Venice, Paris, Prague and other more traditional tourist destination offer much to see as well. We also enjoy sharing out apartment with fellow Peace Corps volunteers, because we’re all in this together. So, if you’re travel plans call for a trip to Eastern Europe…………

Nancy at work on the peppers

Wagon Load of Vinete

Zacusca

Zacusca

Last weekend Nancy and I traveled out to the small village of Leonint in Alba county to the house of Moga Yanci. Yanci is of Hungarian ethnicity so his first name is last. He and his wife Irma are the parents of Yanci who is married to Nancy’s counterpart Anastasia. Anastasia is Moldova Romanian so I wonder if she prefers Anastasia Moga or vice versa. In any case we had a fine time visiting the village and enjoyed the welcoming hospitality of the Mogas and we worked hard making Zacusca.

Zacusca is for Romanians what canned tomatoes and canned beans are to country folks in the United States. They are a rite of harvest and no way does the store bought product match up to the home made. The ingredients for Zacusca are ardei, sweet peppers – round red ones -, morcovi, carrots, ceapa, onions and vinete, eggplant. All of these ingredients Yanci grows on his land. The peppers and eggplant we picked the morning of the cooking of the concoction, the carrots and onions were picked the day before, so everything was extremely fresh.

Zacusca is made over a hot fire. It was my job to feed the old wood stove corn cobs to keep it hot. The onions and carrots were diced and sautéed in a large pot, then the peppers, lots of peppers were diced and placed in a pot of their own to cook. The secret to Zacusca is scorching the eggplant. Twenty of these were placed on the metal of the hot stove to scorch the purple skin and bake the meaty insides. It was also my job to watch the eggplant as I fed the fire.

Once the carrots and onions had most of their moisture burn away they were mixed in with the peppers. The eggplant, once fully scorched on all sides were taken out and the skin peeled away, the insides left to dry in the sun. We added a cheesecloth full of eggplant to the pepper, carrot onion mixture – now in a very large pan and placed it on the top of the stove. Two bottles of home made tomato juice was added. It was my job to stir the pot until most of the remaining moisture was steamed away. After an hour or two of stirring the mixture a few bay leaves were added as was some salt. The mix was soon ready to be put into jars.

I was asked how I was doing during the stir process. I replied, “Fine, but I only wish that we were making ice cream instead.” Nancy is a big fan of Zacusca as are nearly every Romanian no matter if they prefer first name last or the other way ‘round. It’s used as a spread on bread, almost like peanut butter. But if you notice from the recipe the only thing sweet that was added was the sweet of the pepper. My tastes are enough male American to prefer a little sweetness on my spreads. I think we have about thirty jars. Be sure and stop by if you’d like a taste.

Longer than the zacusca will last, which will be a long while, we'll remember the hospitality of our weekend adventure. We came away with a couple of small bottles of the national drink, tsuica that Yanci gave us and we came away with many good memories to go along with those jars of zacusca.

Aunt Anna

Nancy’s Aunt Anna

Anna Geneva Fetzeck, nee Benson died a few days ago at the age of 90. She was Nancy’s Aunt and the last of eleven brothers and sisters. She resided close to the farm where the family was raised in the little northern Pennsylvania town of Ludlow.

My father, as he lay dying of cancer commented that he had found much guidance through life from friends and reading, but that no one had written a book on a guide to dying. I think he was wrong, that a few good books have been written but that they are too morbid for the living to read. I’m not sure how Aunt Anna crossed from life to death, but I suspect with a certain dignity.

I had originally placed ‘quiet dignity’ in the above sentence, but Aunt Anna was not a quiet woman. Not to say she was boisterous, at least not in the time that I knew her, but that she would speak her mind. Her dignity was a home made dignity. Store bought cookies may have a mass appeal, but they lack the authenticity of being home made. Anna’s values were authentic and home made.

Twenty-five years ago when Nancy and I were much younger and involved with children and business and work Alice, Nancy’s mother, and Anna would drive to Virginia to spend a week in May helping keep the ship afloat. The business we owned was very seasonal in nature and May was the busiest time. Anna would have been in her mid-sixties then, Alice in her fifties, but they both came ready to work. I have a picture of Anna dressed in her work clothes, gloves and boots swabbing the deck of the porch of our house in Elkton. Cleaning the porch with a toothbrush was a chore Nancy remembered as a childrhood memory her Aunt Anna assigning her back on the porch at Ludlow. It is appropriate that our best photo of Anna is porch cleaning, sans toothbrush. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the picture to scan and place on this blog, but I’m sure that you can use your imagination.

Anna and I both contended that ice cream belongs as one of the seven basic food groups. Practically every afternoon she’d work a cross word puzzle and practically every evening she’d be happy with her bowl of ice cream before bed. She liked to read and made lists of the books she read. They’d be interesting to study if they turn up when some one sorts through the accumulation of a life of ninety years. Reading books and working crosswords and eating ice cream don’t by themselves define a person with dignity. Volunteering at the Cane Lutheran home, being a mainstay in her community and church at Ludlow, being involved with her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, with her nieces and nephews does define it.

Anna’s passing is the passing of a generation. The cousins are now oldest descendants of the Benson family that migrated from Sweden to the woods of north central Pennsylvania. The original Benson’s were farmers and people of the soil. The most successful thing they raised from that difficult land was their eleven children.

The simile of a home baked cookie keeps coming to mind as I think of Aunt Anna, irregular and imperfect but with unmatched warmth and goodness. It is a sign of my high regard for her that she brings to mind thoughts of comfort food.

What follows death we know not with absolute certainty; whether there is reward for our wholesomeness or penalty for our recklessness, or whether we shall have some sort of consciousness at all. Anna was a Lutheran, as am I, and with a solid degree of faith so perhaps she has rejoined her brothers and sisters and father and mother. It seems to me that one measure of a life is the traces that one leaves behind and no matter what the passing of life ultimately means, in her living of life Anna Geneva will be remembered with warmth and fondness.