The American apparition

Saturday, July 27, 2013

07:34

By Michael

            On Thursday morning, Yulia and I spotted a young man, about our age, riding a bicycle. He caught our eye because he did not look like a local. In fact, he looked very much like an American! He was wearing a hat very similar to one of mine from the “Hat People” in Talent, Oregon—tan, with a soft cover and short brim.

            His behavior was also very unlike a local. He rode by our house and then turned around to take a picture of our neighbor’s barn. I was consulting Yulia about a flower bed by our front gate when he did this. Yulia shouted to him, “ДОБРИЙ ДЕНЬ! [GOOD DAY!]” and asked what he was doing. He responded by saying that he was taking picture of a barn. We didn’t know what to say after that.

            We suspect he was a photographer or artist of some sort. Most locals would not stop to take a picture of something so mundane. Yulia also noted an accent when he spoke, though I did not pick up on it. If he were an American he would have been wandering very far away from the nearest tourist attraction. But that is beside the point.

We want to see more people like this—regardless if they are American, Ukrainian or whatever. Although our little village is better taken care of than others, Yulia and I think this place (and Ukraine in general) needs more young and creative energy. We would have loved to strike up a conversation and meet a new acquaintance. So if you are out there, American bicyclist, please come back!

On running water and wells

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

08:50

By Michael

 One of the most shocking things that we tell people about our living situation here is the absence of plumbing in our house. Having never been in a place without running water, most Americans, I think, have trouble imagining what life is like without indoor plumbing. I was one of these Americans before coming to Ukraine. Urban Ukrainians, on the other hand, want to forget that living without water on tap is even a possibility. For many of them, such a way of life was a reality at some point in their lives, and they want to put that all behind them on their march to a more “civilized” lifestyle. I am, of course, generalizing. My opinions on these points of view are extrapolated from observation, and I am in no way picking on any one person in particular. As I have said, these are sentiments shared by many people.

There are positives and negatives to each method of getting water. Let us address them. Contrary to belief, living without indoor plumbing is not a dirty lifestyle. Yulia and I do not live like the half monkey, half humans and drink from mud puddles while screeching unintelligibly at our neighbors as depicted in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We are actually very clean people. As I mentioned before, we bathe daily, in the evening before going to sleep. In that way we think we bring less dirt into our bed. We do not even let our cats, whom we adore, sleep on top of our blankets (Despite this, Levko has still managed to leave a few paw prints on our sheets.).

Well water is also of better quality than most municipal tap water that we have used in the past. With her longer hair, Yulia has noticed that city tap water dries out her hair very quickly whenever she washes it in the city. We have both noticed that our skin dries out fast in the city. It makes us wonder why pay for the service of an inferior product when one can have a higher quality one for free.

The cost of installing and fixing indoor plumbing is also much higher. Two winters ago Yulia and I were living at Yulia’s parents’ house in Lviv. The hot water heater broke for some reason and we not only did not have hot water, but cold water as well. We are not trained plumbers, so fixing this machine was out of the question. We had to call for a plumber, who could not come for a day or two, leaving us with a bunch of fancy equipment that could not provide us with any water at all for the duration of that time. When he finally came to fix it, it cost an arm and a leg, of course. Simple systems require simple fixes. Right now we get our water by lowering a bucket attached to a string into some water. A couple of days ago, actually, the bucket detached from the string. This would have effectively cut off our water supply had we not been able to attach a hook onto the string and fish out the bucket.

Yulia’s grandparents have the same kind of well we do (with a bucket and rope), but they had running water installed last year, which used the well as the source. Using tap water very quickly depleted their water. After a few months the bucket no longer reached the water. Yulia’s grandparents said they had never seen the water level so low. While running water is very convenient (and, remember, we are not completely anti-tap water), it is also very wasteful. There is no reason that one needs to pee into a few gallons of potable tap water only to flush it. Most people do not understand, to be blunt, the insanity of such behavior. It is hard to comprehend how much water one actually wastes living this lifestyle. Having a traditional well and watching the level drop so suddenly was a visceral reminder of this wastefulness.

As I mentioned before, tap water is convenient. It is easy to turn a valve and have water flow into the home and then exit through the drain. In the winter it is obviously a nuisance to go outside to fetch water and dump the waste water. Having a hot water heater only makes this more convenient. We like to take the occasional bath, and water on tap is very helpful for this. Although it is possible to fill up a bath tub bucket by bucket, I would not say that this is practical (though I do think washing dishes and bathing the way we do is). We have yet to see about laundry. Right now in July washing our laundry by hand has been OK. Maybe it’ll be different in January. What I want to stress here is that Yulia and I are not completely dismissive of either method of using water. When we say to people that we are using a well, however, they typically assume we are completely against tap water. We do not hold this position at all. We see the best of both worlds, so to speak (and also understand that the use of well and spring water needs to be defended—it has few supporters.). We should also mention that this little homily about water use is specific to our particular context. It would be very near impossible to prescribe that dwellers of high rise apartment buildings or hospitals throw a rope and bucket down a well.

Let me share what our water situation is actually like and what we plan to do about in the future. Right now we have a well on our property. It is basically a cylindrical tube, made out of concrete. It is not completely finished right now. It still needs a covering and a hand crank to lower and raise the bucket. Right now it is covered by a piece of plywood and we lower the bucket into the water without the assistance of a pulley. 

Our well

The well does need to be cleaned out. I’ve never observed this process before, but, from what I understand, someone would come over, pump out all the water, scoop out any muck and debris from the bottom, lay down some fresh gravel, and we would then add some effective microorganisms (to deter the growth of mold, bad bacteria) to the water once it starts to filter through the clay subsoil back into the well.

            Right now we do not drink the water from the well, but use it for doing laundry, washing dishes, and washing ourselves. We get our drinking water from the local spring, which is about 200 meters down the road.

Our spring

I usually get 24 liters of it at a time. I carry four 6 liter bottles with me—two bottles in a back pack and one bottle in each of my hands. It is not a struggle for me to carry this amount of water from the spring to our house. Plus, it is a pleasant little walk and a serene place to visit. I made a makeshift sink in our kitchen. We have a ceramic cistern with a water spout at the bottom. It holds about 10 liters of water. When we open the valve on the water spout it flows out (very much like a conventional tap) over a sink that drains into a bucket. When the bucket fills up I take it outside and dump the water. We wash our hands and brush our teeth here. And last, but not least, we water our garden with a hose. So we do actually have running water of sorts! Our hose is a simple and nifty contraption. It consists of a hose attached to a water pump that we lower into the well. The pump has a cord with a plug that we insert into an outlet and, voila! (Pardon my French.) We have running water!

            After we get our well cleaned out, we plan to cover it with a little gabled roof and fetch the water with a wooden bucket. I think it will look very quaint under the grape vines. We’ve decided to put plumbing into our house and guest area sometime in the future. We really do hope that our friends and family visit (and stay for longer than a few hours), and indoor running water seems to be a prerequisite for many of them. It is also more practical for drawing a bath, for example. So hopefully this addition to our home will both benefit Yulia and I…and draw guests to come visit us and our new home.

*          *          *

One of the final things I’d like to share about the use of wells is that wells have determined, to an extent, where people have chosen to live here in Ukraine. When riding the bus, and traveling in general, I enjoy “reading the landscape.” I like to understand why things are where they are. That goes for the natural, as well as the built environment. I’ve noticed here in Ukraine that people have chosen to settle in relatively low lying areas. One rarely finds old houses on hill tops. At first I was confused by this building pattern. Why build in the valley (which is more susceptible to frosts—cold air runs downhill, after all) when one could build on a more scenic hill? The answer is quite practical. When one has to dig a well by hand, it makes sense to locate one’s house where the water table is lower.

A few upcycling mini projects

Sunday, July 21, 2013

08:39

By Michael

            We’ve been working on cleaning and fixing up our place since we’ve moved in. When we first arrived, our first job was to clean up the house. There was a lot of Pan Oleh and his wife’s stuff here. We took most of it out to the garage, overstuffing that space. We’ll get to organizing that in the near future. If Yulia and I have learned anything from this experience, it is to try not to accumulate a lot of things over the course of our lifetime. We will not live forever and eventually somebody will have to go through our things and save them or throw them out. The packrat mentality of saving everything because one never knows when it will come in handy can be helpful, but most of the time that rainy day never comes. We’ve tried to be as resourceful as we can though. There were about four dozen pairs of shoes when we arrived, for example. Since we don’t have any string or rope yet, Yulia took the shoe laces from the footwear, tied them together, and propped up some beautiful flowering bushes that were falling over onto the footpath. We specifically asked Pan Oleh’s wife to not through away any clothing or fabric so we could use them for our future permaculture projects. We’ve already taken some old curtains and put them to use. We made a no-till garden bed by first cutting down the weeds on that particular spot, spreading out the fabric onto the ground, and laying compost on top. We plan to plant lettuce and kale there very soon.

            There’s also a huge pile of bricks out back. I’ve already put them to use in a sidewalk making mini project. 

 

We had to lay down the brick because we reclaimed a little corner of a flower bed, creating a shortcut across the lawn. As you can see, we are already wearing out a path in the grass. We may need to eventually lay down a walkway all the way to the path where our cat, Levko, is walking.

            We also made an outdoor bathing spot. We started it by digging a shallow foundation and placing four poles secured by stakes in each of the corners.

 

Digging the foundation

We then filled in the foundation with small stones and random pieces of rubble. Pan Oleh had a small pile of this on the other side of the linden tree in the background. Ideally, we would have preferred to use small, rounded pebbles. They do not interlock with each other (because they are round, obviously) and therefore keep a lot of airspace between themselves, which is ideal for good drainage. But it’s always good to use whatever’s lying around. This assorted rubble (pieces of brick, concrete, stone, and roof tile) seems to create the same conditions that pebbles do, but they do not create a level surface because of their chunky, odd shapes. You’ll see how we dealt with that issue soon.

The foundation

On top of the rubble we put down a wooden platform to stand on and covered the walls with some of that leftover fabric I was talking about earlier. We used half pieces of brick around the edges to create a level surface to place the platform on.  Here is the partially done project:

Here’s the finished product:

You can see a solar powered garden light on top of the front, right post. The tree stump in front might be a good place to attach a hook for hanging towels and clothes while bathing. The clothes line is not too far away. You can see the clothespins on the left side. There is a dead apple tree behind the shower. We may just chop that down eventually. And I should correct myself. There is not one, but there are two linden trees in the background. Yulia told me yesterday that it is considered good luck to plant linden trees in pairs [From Yulia: Please read my beloved author—self-dubbed regenerate biologist Diana Beresford –Kroeger’s book Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest to get more info about why twin linden trees are considered to be lucky and other fascinating details in regards to trees. Her books are full of rare and interesting facts, I promise.]. Also, you may have noticed the dead weeds scattered about the ground. This spot, like most of the land on the property, was covered by six foot tall weeds when we arrived. We had to rip them out by hand. Not easy work. I tried using Pan Oleh’s scythe to take them out, but they were too big and strong. They broke the scythe twice already. I was able to fix it both times, but was still angry at myself and the weeds for breaking such a beautiful antique.

Our scythe

 If anyone is interested in why Yulia and I do not want to plough all our land and use no till methods instead, this is why. Ploughed land is damaged land, and invasive plants will insert themselves on sick soil. There are scientific reasons for this, but I won’t get into that now. The wild fields all around our village do not have such monstrous weeds like our own land does, by the way.

            Here is one more picture of our bathing spot.

Inside the washing area

To bathe, we fill up the tub with cold water from the well and then add a pot of boiling hot water that we heat on our stove. We then take the cup (left) and pour it over ourselves until we are all wet. Then we take the soap (right) and get ourselves soapy. Then we take the cup and rinse ourselves off. We bathe daily, so having a place to wash is important to us. The screen lets us wash when it is light out (Before this we were washing on our concrete patio after it got dark out so that the neighbors could not see us.). I am so descriptive about the washing process because a lot of people ask us what it is like to live without running water. In general, there seems to be a lot of trepidation over it. It does take some getting used to, but it is not as difficult as it may seem. Because there is so much to say about it, I want to address the “running water issue” sometime in the near future.

Introduction

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

06:00               

By Michael

My name is Michael, and my wife’s name is Yulia.

Yulia and me wearing a green clay mask

I am proud to finally write that we have just moved into our first house and that we have been living here for about two weeks now. We live in a small Ukrainian village. It is located in western Ukraine. The land around here is spotted with small villages, which are scattered about the undulating countryside of fields and forests. Our village has a lovely spring that is well taken care of by the locals. In fact, an older man who lives close by has been busy at work laying down a brick-tiled sidewalk by the dirt road adjacent to the spring. As far as I can tell he is doing the work by himself using his own funds. Our village, like most Ukrainian villages, is densely settled. This leaves plenty of open space for natural fields and forests and farming around the residential core. We are within earshot of our boisterous neighbors across the street, but by the time you get to the rear edge of our property you are amidst fields and one heck of a big sky. And I’m not exaggerating. The sky here is big. Like Montana. During the day the clouds float above the crown of your head like an ethereal blanket, and at night the stars are smeared from horizon to horizon.

The big sky

Our house is an older timber framed, waddle and daub clay plastered abode. The property is beautifully adorned with flower beds, climbing grape vines, 27 apple trees among other fruit trees. 

Our house

There is a half finished pond. It is half finished because, sadly, Pan Oleh died last fall while living here and making improvements to the property (Pan means mister is Ukrainian. Neither Yulia nor I knew Pan Oleh while he was alive, but we are friends with his family. I therefore use pan as a mark of respect.). He was improving and beatifying the house and landscape before inviting his wife to move out here from the city. This piece of land has belonged to his family for several generations, and Yulia and I are sincerely grateful to Oleh and his family for this gift of true potential. And that is how we think of it. As a place of true potential. Yulia and I have been planning how to continue beautifying the already beautiful place. We hope to have children here and have them grow together with all the little sprouts and mighty trees we plant.

It is about time that we write our first blog entry and get things rolling. We have been searching for a home for about two years now and have been talking about a blog for nearly as long. We want the start of our blog to correspond with the start of our life at our new home. By writing this blog we hope to get out the story of what we are doing. Yulia and I want to inspire others, tell interesting stories, discuss our family’s lifestyle and cultural musings, and attract like minded people to be our neighbors.

Yulia and I are grateful for the countless sources of inspiration we have gleaned from over the years. We have, for example, compiled a large collection of interior design and gardening photos from various websites—anything from cup holders to greenhouses. Just seeing the DIY projects from others has sparked our own inspiration and creativity. We want to pass that on.

Yulia and I are also story tellers. Yulia always says that she can make up a story extemporaneously and does it for the simple joy of storytelling itself. I think there’s something to storytelling. It makes sense that narrative is the way that people understand the world. Our lives are one big story. That is how we experience the world—as a sequence of events. Narrative applies to so much in life. I remember reading a French philosopher in graduate school who theorized that cities were literally stories. For as one walks down a street a story unfolds, and that story is the city itself. I could prattle on and on about this, but I’ll stop myself here.

What’s more important is to introduce who it is we are and what our lifestyle is like. In a nutshell, Yulia and I met on a farm in the state of Wisconsin. I think we were both searching for a way to get out of the city to a job that would require us to work outside in the fresh air. We found our similarities in gardening, eating, and the arts. We clicked by growing and eating purple potatoes (purchased from The Outpost natural food store in Milwaukee) and drinking kombucha while going to see plays for Yulia’s college drama course. While I was born in the US and Yulia was born in Ukraine, we were able to speak to each other in two languages—Ukrainian and English—right from the beginning. My grandparents immigrated to the US from Ukraine and passed on the language and culture to me. Being newcomers to our new house, Yulia and I are in a state of transition right now. And more than that, we are spread across the US and Ukraine through our families and our own experiences. We find that we are outsiders or don’t quite fit into our surrounding cultures a lot of the time.  It has made us very reflexive, and we hope to share these reflections in our blog.

As opinionated, vegetarian, artistic, family oriented Ukrainian-Americans, we realize that it’s not so easy to label and understand us right away, but we also realize that we’re not quite so odd as to be completely misunderstood. We hope to use this blog to foster a cross cultural exchange on many different levels. First of all, we’d like to make sense of Ukraine to an American culture and America to a Ukrainian culture (and to those reading from outside those two countries, Ukraine and America to the rest of the world). Ukraine and America are not what they are made out to be through the lens of the media, for example. We want to portray and shape this cross cultural exchange from our own perspective. We also want to reach out to other like minded people who may share some or all of our values. We are interested in maintaining our existing relationships with other people and creating new ones. Because we are in a new house in a new place, this is very important to us at the moment. And we are serious about people visiting us, even finding new neighbors to join us. Please, let’s all keep in touch.

Lastly, I want to address why this blog is called, “MY Pichka.” First of all, “MY” is an acronym for Michael and Yulia’s. In this way, Yulia and I can each say, “It’s MY blog,” and mean that it is our blog. And pichka is the Ukrainian word for oven or, more specifically, masonry heater. The explanation for this involves a short back story. When Yulia reads, she often reads out loud to me. That way, as she puts it, she can talk about what she’s reading with someone and feel like a more active, rather than a passive, reader. She often will come across a writer who uses French words in the middle of an English text and remarks on how odd it is that French is one of the few languages (Latin is another one of these, of course) which is permissible to insert in an English text. In some cases, it’s stylistic. In others, an elitist form of bragging. And sometimes there is no good English word to use that has the same definition as the French meaning. Yulia mentioned that we should start doing that with Ukrainian. So here is our first attempt at it. Pichka is a traditional brick or earthen oven used to cook in and heat homes in Ukraine. It is often the centerpiece of the home, quite large and used for multiple purposes (like drying fruit and sleeping). It is not quite the oven one would find under a gas range, nor is it, say, a pot belly or cast iron stove. The English word, masonry heater, is a bit too clunky and awkward for my taste. It lacks the brevity and cuteness inherent in pichka. And the word pichka is very similar to the Ukrainian words pachka and kachka, two of the many nicknames Yulia and I dotingly call each other. This only adds a more personal relevance to the word pichka for us. We therefore recommend people start using the word pichka in a tongue and cheek attempt to introduce it to the English language. This blog will be our pichka, a gathering place for friends and family, full of warmth and domesticity.