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| "Dude"; Flowers; Farm cart - photos by Ellie Perla |
Summer Views of the Banat
I want to begin this entry by apologizing for my extended absence on this blog. I blame the effects of a Floridian summer - the lazy, hazy, let's face it, infernal days one invariably stumbles through every year here in Miami. They seem to spark a sort of mental hibernation, a Lotus Eater syndrome, and try as you might to pull yourself together, only a cold front (ie 85 degrees) or the mad rush of an impending hurricane possesses the force to snap a person back to reality. Well, there is a third tonic, but it must be administered in small doses, or else risk falling off the other end. I refer of course to the crassly overeager August-month Christmas displays at the craft store. What else can jolt you with the sense of life hurling past your ears as effectively as that? But I digress...
Whichever the reason for my arousal, I am here to announce that I am once again determined to resume living above the steamy stupor of my tropical paradise (or postapocalyptic wasteland ... tomaito tomahto) and return to what I love more than anything...the sound of my own internal voice...That said, I debated which subject I might want to use to celebrate the end of my hiatus. I suppose nothing could serve as a better antidote to my beachy mindset than the very serious topic of Vienna's Postwar Displaced Persons Camps, to which I refer in Part II of GIBBIN HOUSE: Traveling Without Moving. But I think I will save this for my next entry, when I have sobered up enough to do the history justice.
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| Country Woods - photo by Ellie Perla |
Instead, let me share a little of what inspired this book in the very, very beginning - the images that floated in my mind back when I was sitting with my mother in a coffeeshop in late 2001, just like Anka and her mother in the first scene: I had finished Grad School some months earlier and broken off a five year relationship, I had no income, few friends, and not the slightest clue what to do with my life. All I had were buried away hopes and girlhood memories.
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| Banat Farmers - photo by Ellie Perla |
But as I sat listlessly with the chaos of techno music licking my face, these memories began to form themselves into an idea , into a story of someone like me traveling across a continent, like Perrine over the Pyrennes, and I thought of where it might all begin, her home...my own birthplace, the Banat. I will write more about this place another time. For now, a few glimpses of its landscape, a few last injections of summer before the real work begins:
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| Summer Wheat Fields - photo by Ellie Perla |
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| Banat Country Scene - photo by Ellie Perla |
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| Harvest Girls - Courtesy of Andershausen Banat |
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| Country Home - photo by Ellie Perla |
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