ID 74639465 © Dmytro Tolmachov | Dreamstime.com
The house is immaculately maintained, with a manicured lawn and a flower garden lining the front walkway. Marigolds peek out over the stone edging, with red geraniums behind them and the green leaves of lilies not yet in bloom still further back. Purple petunias spill lushly from window boxes.
I glance down at my sheet and note the Polish last name. By itself it doesn’t mean anything; many people in the U.S. have Polish last names without knowing the language. But then, as I’m ringing the doorbell, I notice the white lace curtains hanging in the windows. Now I’m almost positive. The front door opens and reveals an older woman, with short gray hair and a kind, wrinkled face, a face that I can tell is Polish. It just has a certain quality - one that cannot be put into words. On her feet are white socks and the final confirmation - tan leather slippers, probably purchased at a street bazaar in Zakopane. Without further hesitation, I smile and say, “Dzień dobry.”
Photo from Adobe Stock
After I explain that I’m there to do an insurance inspection, we chat for a while, about which parts of Poland we’re from and in what year we emigrated. The woman shows me her garden. She calls me “pani” and offers me coffee or tea - classic Polish hospitality. My heart is warmed.
Every so often it happens - I’m gifted with a slice of Poland on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes it’s hearing my native language in an unexpected place, the Polish consonants colliding into each other like pedestrians on a crowded sidewalk, making me whip my head around to locate their source. Or I’ll see faces in a crowd and know with absolute certainty that they belong to my fellow rodacy. (“Te mordy,” as Bogusław Linda so succinctly put it in the 1997 film Szczęśliwego Nowego Jorku.)
Sometimes a slice of Poland comes in the form of a concrete object, like when I was fourteen and had just returned home from a summer in Lipnica, and for the first time I found an issue of a “Bravo Girl!” magazine in a Polish store in Springfield. Every week that summer, my friends and I had gone to the kiosk to buy the publication, and then pored over the articles about health and beauty and dating, as well as torn out posters of musical sensations like The Backstreet Boys and Varius Manx and Piasek. Finding this magazine in America felt like striking gold. Or my senior year in high school, when we got internet at home for the first time, and I could watch shows like “Klan” and “Na Dobre i Na Złe” and see what all of my favorite characters had been up to since I’d last seen them.
The reminders of Poland that fill me with the most nostalgia, however, are the ones I find in nature. Poppy flowers. Cows grazing in a pasture or bales of hay spread out along the rolling countryside. A field of barley, with trees in the distance gently swaying in the wind, and what I like to think of as Polish sky overhead - puffy, white-grayish clouds against the azure blue of a perfect June day.
Image by Peter Dargatz from Pixabay
Last summer, while on vacation in New Hampshire, my husband and I took our sons to a state park to go swimming. As soon as we turned onto the dirt road that led into the woods, my heart skipped a beat because the scenery reminded me so much of those long-ago summers, when my older cousins Wiesia or Lucyna would drive us kids into a forest which looked very much like this one, taking care to avoid the large roots in the narrow lane and parking wherever there was room near the trees - just like we were now doing. No asphalt had been unfurled in this wilderness, no buildings had been erected - there was just the dirt road, the sounds of happy children on the beach, and the crystalline lake shimmering between the trees. Honestly, I was so excited I wanted to run straight toward it and splash right in; alas, I was seven months pregnant and was able to manage only a slightly quicker version of my usual waddle.
Prince Edward Island - Summer 2011
When my friend Melissa and I traveled to Prince Edward Island a few years ago, I felt like I’d found a whole slab of Poland instead of just a slice. It was incredible how closely the topography of the island matched that of my ojczyzna. The lakes, rolling fields, forests of pine trees, and even the narrow roads pulled at my heart and filled my soul with a deep longing. But all I could do was rhapsodize about the similarities and exclaim every five minutes, “This reminds me of Poland!” In high school, I would repeat this phrase so often that it became a running joke with us. Back then, I still didn’t feel quite at home in America, and so every little reminder of my birth country served as the connection I was missing.
ID 79668615 © Fotokon | Dreamstime.com
As a teenager, I would yearn for those slices of Poland, and I’d try to find them everywhere, in everything. On the one hand, they were like manna in the desert, filling me up and holding me over while I crossed off each day on my calendar, anxious for the next summer to arrive so I could fly off to Poland once more. On the other hand, they were sharp, if I wasn’t careful. Even something like hearing a certain song on the radio, or driving by a bus stop that in the slightest resembled some of the structures sprinkled alongside Polish roads, could fill me with tęsknota - longing - for the place I was from. To give you an idea of how desperate I was to find those reminders - if you don’t have a good one already - I’ll provide you with one more example of what could stir up my tęsknota: the buzzing of flies. Ha!
I may have been a bit of a melodramatic teen, I admit, but my love for those slices of Poland has not waned (well, except for the flies!). Something these days is different, however. These days, I’m no longer focusing all of my energies on finding those reminders. When I do, they’re a pleasant surprise, a gift - rather than something that closes off my heart to my second home and blinds me to what is underneath my very own nose. I’ve learned to open my eyes to the beauty of the places here, in my adopted country, and - dare I say it? - I’ve even fallen in love with quite a few of them.
I love the way the sun sets over the marshes when we go camping at Salisbury Beach. I love the cornfields behind the tiny elementary school at which I taught third grade in my twenties. I love the hill towns of Western Massachusetts, especially during the fall, when we pack into our mini-van with apple cider donuts and coffee (albeit not pumpkin-spice because hey - we can’t get too American), and we drive along the winding roads or even up north to Vermont, feasting our eyes on all the shades of maroons and golden yellows and ruby reds which the trees proudly display.
Salisbury Beach State Park - Summer 2017
ID 112389049 © Snehitdesign | Dreamstime.com
These days, chancing upon a slice of Poland is like running into a dear old friend. It no longer takes away from the life I’ve built here; instead, it reminds me that I have more than one place on Earth that I can call home.
And for that, I am eternally grateful.