by neznakomka

Created on: December 05, 2008

"At home, we don't put salt on the tomatoes", it slipped out of my mouth.

"And what is here, if not home?", my mother was slicing the bread, and basically she was right to ask the question.

"It is a home, but in Buckovets is a home also".

For sure.

After living for years with my grandparents and beloved uncle and spending sporadically a month or two with my parents in the opposite part of Bulgaria, my perception of home had spread like a map from border to border, a whole-night trip by train. Day-dreaming in either my parents' or my grandparents' home, I was imagining my hair or my nails growing so long to reach from the one home to the other without being interrupted and without good-bye separations.

"I still remember how you were crying", Grandma used to tell me. "How you were reaching to me with those little arms through the open window of the train, tears rolling all over your face, I couldn't imagine you crying all night long like this, waking up everybody on that train, I was sure you were going to cry all night long."

Obviously, my parents were sure, too. They gave up. Carrying me with a warm good-bye hug, my father exited the train and submitted me to Grandma's arms, where my two years old being happily belonged.

A couple of minutes later, we waived to the departing train, and my parents waived back, wiping off their tears with the quiet sadness of empty-nesters.

My father had brought me to my grandparents' home when I was 6 months old.

"She is not going to survive", Grandpa was looking at me and weeping. "Look how blue she is".

At that time, my mother was hospitalized and slowly recovering from a leg surgery, a dangerous complication as a result of her pregnancy and delivery. My father was her only visitor. He used to spend day and night next to her bed, making up for the hostility their marriage provoked in his family.

It was a passionate love story that took only two months to develop into a husband-and-wife relationship. Having graduated from a local vocational school for preparation of preschool teachers, my mother was assigned to practice her profession for three years in a remote village in the opposite part of the country.

"When I heard this, I nearly collapsed", my grandmother used to tell me. "Nobody wanted to live there, in Dobrudsha. It was said to be the god-forsaken and driest place of the country where people had to line up and pay money for a cup of water."

But the financial penalty if not complying with this rule of the communist "labor market"

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