I am from a town … in Ukraine.
Kobeliaky. Which is way different from here. We don’t have skyscrapers. Well, apart from the treetops scraping the sky. In our yards, we have large gardens. Flowers, fruit, and vegetables are sleeping there. Each early morning, the downtown turns into an open-air market. My grandma works there.
My town isn’t hiding anything. It’s not pretending. And, you know, with time, it taught me to be natural, too. This nakedness, eventually, made me grow into my town. Or.. the other way around.
Now, we travel holding hands wherever my feet bring us. My eyes recall my hometown memories when familiar things stumble over me. My body moves as if to the rhythm of the wind from where I grew up. I hear the melody of my town’s rivers in the Chicago rains. I carry the tan on my skin from the hometown sun.
“Wow”, you think. “But what’s so aesthetic and special there to miss?”
Show, don’t tell, - they say. Done. I hope you can make these photo puzzles into a holistic idea of what my town, and Ukraine, in general, is.
a soccer field near my grandma’s
which is home to so many kids’ childhood memories.
a playground near my great-grandma’s
squeaking swings and a coming-off paint - this is the noise and the image of childhood
my school featuring the necessary attributes -
old school buses and the never-aging flag.
houses and apartments
left: barely glancing from behind the chestnut trees, the old-style apartment building, and a grocery shop on the first floor. it’s very common in Europe.
right: a wayside with a typical old design of our houses, and trees are omnipresent at home, as you might have noticed already.
about chestnut trees.
kinda a symbol of Kobeliaky :) there is a fair few of chestnut alleys throughout the whole town.
in the tree shadows — a bus (or hitchhiking?) stop
Ukrainian flag has a blue top and a yellow bottom?
obvious. it’s because even in such a small town like mine, you would find a field with yellow wheat or sunflowers under the blue skies.
a typical evening when i am going home
after hanging out with friends or getting some cookies from the nearby small store.
while kids are waiting outside,
the sun is trying to make its inside. it’s a grocery shop. the scene only turned out to be quiet, in fact, the shop is in between a busy road and two churches.
woo, getting more private.
just showing you the coziness and simplicity of my room at grandma’s.
my town has got more than six beaches.
this one is called “Golden”, and we would usually get into the forest on the other side of the river with friends, and lose ourselves in the wonderland.
the chocolate-colored fence on the right
is my grandma’s. this is my favorite road in the town, which makes me feel as if I am in a cute cartoon and have a carefree life.
remember of the open-air market I told you about?
I also had a spot there. I used to sell our. home-grown fruit.
about the sky.
what I truly miss about my town is deep colors of a summer sky. occasionally, it would rain, bringing with itself this somewhat intimidating, but overall aesthetically-pleasing art above our heads.
I bet you get an impression that i am living in a botanic garden. well. me too. You would encounter this flora anywhere in the country. Hope you enjoyed your digital journey, reader. Maybe you have a particular request for the next one?
P.S. Thought this article would be a political weep? We can get to that one day. For now, we are just having a light coffee-chat. Didn’t my last article on Ukrainian modern pop give you a coffee-like energy boost? :)
