A Final Walk

Before Christmas I spent four weeks waiting to sign the contract for the sale of the house. In the end the signing took place on the morning of my departure date. So I am again in the Czech Republic to partially empty the house and sort various other matters.

So here I am sitting in a room that no longer feels like mine - there are no books, no cds, no pictures on the wall and very limited choice of food. I will be handing over my keys on Thursday, this is the end of my life in my Czech home. I have removed the brass fox doorknocker from the front door and for the first time I haven't seen my friend and mentor the local fox during my stay, although I am hoping he will come and say goodbye before I leave.

My lovely husband is with me for this last visit, for which I am very grateful as this is all proving very hard. Today was his birthday, so we took the early evening bus into Krumlov and had a meal at Nonna Gina's, the pizza restaurant we used to regularly visit with Hannah. Afterwards we took a walk through a nearly deserted town. It was just like it used to be, when first we visited the Krumlov. Without hordes of visitors and with wood smoke hanging in the crisp air, we could enjoy the atmosphere and beauty of the historic town, imagining that around the corner might appear someone from a time gone by. I haven't felt like that for a long time.

Black Stork at the Swimming Pond

On the walk down to the train station I pass the swimming pond. The pond is now frozen over and soon the ice will be thick enough to skate on. But on hot summer days it is full of locals enjoying the cool waters. This is not a swimming pool as we Brits know it. It is fed by water from the local brook and is a place for nature as well as humans. In the spring and autumn the water is sometimes disturbed by carp rising to the surface and returning to the depths or by flies breaking the surface as they take their first flights. Occasionally a heron patrols the shallows and for a while an enterprising fisherman had a boat moored at its side.

I remember how there used to swimming ponds in England like this one. There was a ruined one a few minutes walk from my Cotswold town, where the more adventurous kids used to swim even though it was silting up. The rest of us would cycle to Stanway, where there was still an open-air swimming pond, with wooden changing cubicles and mown grass on the water. These attractions have all gone, no doubt considered unsafe and unhealthy.

A year or so ago I was walking past the pond when I was amazed to see a black stork wading in the water. Whilst white storks are a common sight in villages and fields throughout the country, the black stork is an altogether rarer sight. The black stork is a shy bird, avoiding humans and restricted primarily to the forests and lakes. I suppose I should not have been as surprised as I was, after all my village borders the Boletice forest, which for many years was a restricted area. But still I had never seen a black stork at the pond or indeed anywhere else before, and I have not seen one since.

The House Gnome

This little fellow came with the house. He was here when we took possession of the place on that bright sunny November morning in 2005. He has stood watch over the approach to the front door ever since. In winter he wears a hat of snow, in summer his paint fades and blisters still more. At times he has guarded more than that. Keys were left under his feet and the person who was to retrieve the key was told that “our little friend has the keys.” When I leave this house for the last time, I will leave it under his watchful eye. Like those ancient household Slavic gods (the Domovoy), you can't easily part a gnome from his house.

Wolves or not

A friend and I were laughing recently about our mutual friend, Hannah, who always denied that wolves could be in the Czech Republic. But then she always denied that anything bad could be from the country. Even if she had a flu it was because you had brought it from England.

Wolves had been hunted to extinction here in the 19^th century, indeed there is a memorial in the Sumava to the last one. The big bad wolf of the fairytales was banished to the forests of other countries. And yet, the memory of wolves lived on in folk memory. I felt it distinctly in the darkness of the forest I viewed from the window of that night-bound train in Easter 1990. I felt it as I lay in a bed piled high with duvets on those freezing nights of my first stay in the house. As I heard the pad of snow dropping from the broken roof I thought of wolf padding through the drifts at the rear of the house, the following day my imaginings were reinforced by fox prints enlarged by the melting of snow. Maybe that is why the first book I wrote here was called Mother of Wolves.

The big bad wolf is now officially back. He was first seen, caught on a trip-camera near Vyssi Brod barely twenty miles from here. Wild creatures do not respect lines on maps and once the physical barrier of the Iron Curtain had been removed it was only a matter of time before the wolves' wanderings brought them into the Sumava Forest and beyond. It seems only right that EU freedom of movement should extend to this beautiful animal, if not in future to Brits.

Sumava - The Sound of the Forest

I have been listening to a delightful radio programme on the BBC called Susurrations of Trees - susurration is the English word for the sound trees make. The programme does not just explore the sound made by different trees, but also the different words we have for those sounds - psithurism for example is the sound of the wind in the trees. Of course the Czechs also have a word for it, but they go one step further their largest forest is called the psithurism - The Sumava (pronounced shoomava). My home is on the edge of it; the little town where I catch the bus is called Horice na Sumava. 

The Sumava extends over the border with Germany, where it becomes the Bayerischer Wald ( the more mundane Bavarian Forest). This huge forest is the most extensive (over 54,000 hectares) in central Europe and has the nickname the Green Roof of Europe or sometimes the Green Lung of Europe. And I love it.

I have spoken in earlier posts of the importance of forests to the Czechs, that it has a role in the Czech mind that is equivalent to the sea to the British. Sometimes when I walk in the forest and a wind gets up I feel this connection strongly. The psithurism of the trees is so like the sound of waves that I could close my eyes and I think myself back on a British shore.

Dreaming Of Houses

I sometimes dream of houses; I did last night. Hannah used to take the Jungian line on house dreams that they are not about houses but about the dreamer, with the various floors representing the dreamer's different levels of consciousness. I just note that they tend to happen when I am busy organizing something about my Czech house, not that the house in my dreams is my Czech house.

When I was buying and reconstructing the house, I dreamed a lot about squeezing through a crack and finding new attics - huge and full of lovely beams. Later I dreamed I was going round and round a house, still squeezing through cracks but into hidden staircases and secret corridors.

Last night I had a different dream. I dreamed that I was sitting with Eliska, and we were talking about how lucky we were to have such nice lovely neighbours. I referred to the ones who had bought and done up the other half of my house. This is interesting as my real house is detached from the neighbours'. Maybe my dream talk was of the potential buyers of my house, who are keen to develop the barn which is attached to the house. I understand their enthusiasm, I too had big visions for the barn and ran out of money. It is one reason I was happy to accept their offer. We will see if their and my dreams come true.

Blogging

One wonderful thing about my life in this country has been this blog. I don't think I fully realized its importance to me until now. Writing the blog was my first step towards starting writing again. Hannah knew that and encouraged me.

Now as my stay in this country draws to a close, I have a wonderful record of my experiences, thoughts and feelings. My parents both enjoyed reading the blog. Much as they would have loved to they were too elderly to visit my Czech home, but the blog allowed them to share my adventures. And then of course there is you, dear reader. I thank you for all your support and feedback. I hope you enjoy the blog posts to come, because even when I leave the house, I will continue blogging about the Czech Republic. I have a list of blog-post topics I have yet to cover. The list of titles extends over several pages in my notebook! And of course I will be visiting Czecho regularly.

This blog is important in another way. I am working on a collection of poems about my love and experience of the Czech Republic. This is separate to the collection I will be publishing next year with Indigo Dreams. I have written approximately half the collection and am working on more poems. Without this blog triggering memories and feelings I doubt I could write the new material. Watch this space.