Autumn in Moldova

I have been lucky this year to have an actual autumn in Moldova. The last two years I just experienced long, bitter winters. I love autumn. Autumn is like those precious minutes you spend curled under covers thinking about your past or the point of it all just before sleep smothers your reflections.

Moldovan autumns are significant, because even in mild years the winters are long, cold, and dismal. Everything is grey and lifeless for months upon months. For the farmers, this means that the livestock must have their provisions well accounted for beforehand. Thus, at the end of the summer, farmers plant their fields full of corn. When the corn is ready, it is cut down, dried, and harvested – ears and all – for the animals. But in the aftermath of the Soviet system, where farmers’ fields are often located far from where their houses are, getting the corn stalks home is something of an event. The streets are gorged with slow, tired horses pulling ancient, beleaguered carts overpiled high with stacks of cornstalks, bringing the corn home.

It really is the rustic quality of Moldova that makes it special. Of course, the Moldovans themselves are embarrassed of their “backwardness.” (or I should say, “those other Moldovans’ backwardness.” It’s always the Romanian speakers’ fault if you are a Russian speaker, or the country-dweller’s fault if you live in the city. Moldovans have many systems of meaningless social divisions in place to keep themselves for accepting accountability for their own country’s pitfalls.) Like people in most “undeveloped” countries, Moldovans dream of the over-industrialized modernity of the 1^st world. As a result, they (or those that can afford it) dwell in ugly crumbling apartment blocks or monolithic houses sequestered behind 10 meter walls without any room left for a garden; spend their free time shopping in pathetically small, ugly, and overpriced shopping malls; or drive past the ubiquitous busses and maxi-taxis in their BMW’s. I don’t mean to disparage people the right to be comfortable in life. But when nature has already supplied you with beauty and peace, and the greater part of your society continues to live in harmony with it, why would you not find your comfort there, rather than in the crumbling, ugly concrete blocks of urban disorder? There’s a reason why those of us from more modernized countries strive to escape to places like Mexico, India, Africa, or even Moldova: we know that we’ve lost something, something that still happens when you have to spend a day riding on the back of a horsecart riding slowly amongst the fading fields of autumn.