Ode to Albanian Summers
Journeys Through Time, Tradition, and Family
Fatmire Gjonbalaj Marke
New Jersey, USA
On an ordinary Tuesday, I picked up a candle in a shop and smelled it. The scent instantly reminded me of the soap my grandmother used to use to hand wash her laundry in a steel basin outside of her exposed cinder block home. The stucco hadn’t been applied yet in those days after the war, so the landscape was dotted with homes made of red cinderblocks and gray cement. It was all very beautiful in its own way. That scent, like many, took me back to summers abroad. Many of us call these places “back home” even if we weren’t born there. There is something to be said about being first generation and calling your parents birthplace “home.” When you’re first generation you are suspended in a gray area your entire life. Never quite belonging completely and fully to one part of you. You are never American enough for the Americans and even back “home” you are never quite Albanian enough. You smell different, you sound different and you carry yourself differently. Yet, going to Kosova, Albania, Montenegro or Macedonia you feel like you are breathing a little easier. These are your people.
While my American peers from school spent their summers visiting their grandparents in places like Boca Raton, Florida I was in the village laying my head on my Nana Loke’s lap while she blew on face and muttered indistinguishable words because she thought the evil eye got me when really, I was just a little too dramatic. While my friends spent nights partying in basements and cornfields in our small town in Connecticut, I was hand in hand with family moving through the brisk nights on muddy ground to the tupan and the cifteli. While Dairy Queen was a staple of an American summer in my hometown, the ice cream I ate often landed me in distress because the power outages caused the ice cream in stores to melt, refreeze and be sold to unsuspecting tourists like me. Yet we still ate it, every single time.
Our summers were spent flying across the world from a very young age with layovers in places like Austria, Germany and Italy. We drove around mountains nearly the size of the Swiss Alps for hours on end, seeing markers every mile or more where people died in car accidents because of the dangerous passes and curves that lead to remote villages. Those journeys lead us to the most beautiful villages like Vuthaj where when you stepped out of your car, you felt as though air had entered your lungs for the very first time. The water was the freshest you could find anywhere and the food, while sharing the same name as the one you made in your apartment in the Bronx, tasted even sweeter or even more savory than anything you could have make in America.
So many of us, accustomed to swimming in pools in the suburbs of America, braved the ice cold waters of the river running through Vuthaj, jumping off small cliffs and running home to the scolding of our grandmothers. In these places, we came face to face with farm animals that supplied the milk we drank and the food we ate in our relative’s homes. Who can forget watching their Daj slaughter an animal, hang it from a tree and skin it? Modernization has reached even the most distant village homes but we can never forget waking up to use the bathroom and having to run out in the dark, cold night air to the outhouse. Our American peers read about them in books set in the 1800s while we lived that reality in summers abroad.
These summers were often our only opportunity to have a real sleep over only for us, it was 20 or more cousins squished together on the floor, never actually sleeping and laughing hysterically into the night. We would fight over a pitchfork to pick up the hay while our cousins shook their heads at our desire to do the back breaking work they had no choice but to do. We thought it was exciting to run down to the cold rive and wash our clothes when there was a water shortage in the hot summer months. We would drive through large swaths of land, through jagged mountains and past fields of poppies blooming a crimson red only nature can produce.
These long trips would sometimes take us to family villas where we were finally able to take a glorious hot shower but just as we would be basking in the warm steam the lights would go out. Standing there in the dark, covered in soap suds, waiting for your mom to get you a candle, a bucket of water and a cup to rinse yourself off. Yet we loved it. The lights going out added to the experience that kept us pleading to go back summer after summer.
In Albania, we would run through the snake infested communist era bunkers that still sat on the land my father had built our house on. We would even take a dip in the canals, finding joy in the mud and God knows what else. There were evenings in the fields when my uncle would take his 9mm and without any fear, hand it to us and let us fire off a shot undoubtedly leading to some degree of hearing loss. There was no need to pack snack because fresh fruit adorned every tree, bush and field we walked past. Years ago, in Albania, weddings were a far cry from the smiling joyful brides of today. At 7 years old, I saw many brides being dragged to the car kicking and screaming. A tradition that infuriated yet intrigued my little mind. The weddings were never ending. One day sitting outside a café in Malisheve, Kosove, two wedding parties passed each other in opposite directions, blaring their horns, hanging out of car windows, waving their colorful mindila’s with the music filling the air. Girls sitting with red sequined shawls over their heads, pretending to cry as her sisters and friends beat the dajre and sang to her, lamenting the fact that she was leaving them for good.
Sometimes when I think about those summers I wonder how I am still alive. We didn’t wear our seatbelts and we sat on the windowsill of rolled down windows in cars as we went to pick up brides. We would watch these brides stand in rows, wearing their traditional clothes and sweating off pounds of makeup and hairspray in the sweltering summer sun. We wanted to be them, moving gracefully on thick white block heels and downcast eyes.
On more quiet days I would lay my head on my grandmother’s lap and listen to her talk about her days as a young girl while she ran her fingers through my hair. Those stories resembled the ones my 7th grade social studies teacher would share about pioneer women. In the mornings I would follow my Daja’s wife into the barn and try to learn how to milk the cows. It didn’t occur to me that her cracked hands were cracked that way because of the labor she had no choice but to do each and every day.
Sometimes, during slow afternoons I would beg to be the one to go to the water wells to fill the jugs. If we got lucky, a relative with a car would drive us to places like Istog or Prizren, passing countless war monuments on the way. Cousins and uncles would share their war experiences while others would not as they fear you were not ready to hear their stories. Shortly after the war, I remember chasing my uncles chickens trying to catch a little chick, running through fields of tall grass and corn, being warned not to go out too far because there were still mines everywhere but still going further because we were young and carefree. We were untouched by the madness of the years of bloodshed that had overtaken that beautiful bittersweet ground.
At the end of those summers, we would all filter out of the house with solemn expression. All of our cousins, aunts and uncles would come out to see us off. Tear filled goodbyes and endless promises murmured and whispered. Some of us left behind loves that we would later marry, some of us left behind grandparents we would never see again, and some of us already had our next trip booked so we could return and shape new memories in the same corners of the same places with the people we cherished through photographs most of the year. We lived these moments and we soaked them up, filling our tanks and hoping that reserve of memories will last us until next time.
