Harvesting Knowledge

  Reading the final chapter in Weeds, "The True Point of All Beginnings", reminded me of my own family history trip where I found my closest living relatives on the original plot of land, where my great-grandfather was born and raised after 102 years of no contact. 

 

It was  cool experience. They were policemen, sheep herders, small time dairy herders, potato farmers, and a government clerk. They also didn't know where my father's grandfather had come from before he had left Plana Balenska, the Plain of the Balens, a little hamlet in the village of Sveti Rok.

 

Probably the coolest thing was how they did not drink alcohol, tea, or coffee; and they didn't smoke. This was so cool. I had so many friends who went and found out their Croatian family did drink, owned a vineyard, and thought the nicest thing they could give a young missionary was a bottle of wine! My family, on the other hand, looked like me, acted like me, even had deeply ingrained behaviors like me. I really appreciated that after years of the abuse I had dealt with for that particular set of behaviors, that they were far more like me than I ever expected. It meant a lot of me.

Later, I learned that it was a Balen family tradition, that Balens do not drink alcohol, handed down over the ages. 

 

They gave us cheese and smoked sausage, they explained who was who and where they had left. I had seen the records of my distant relatives who had been massacred by Serbian forces in 1942. I saw the scorched house that the Serbians had left behind in the 1990's, after they had torched it, making that family there. Reading about the resistance of the Communists by Funda's mother Toni, reminded me that in war, agriculture and farming are usually the first things disrupted.  (pg. 267-268). 

 

Like Funda and Albert Camus, I had crossed oceans and continents to find that "we carry the pieces of our exile in our hearts." (pg. 24ž3). I understand the Živeli's, the Blaženkas, how much we act alike as a family, the weight of history that Europeans, and Eastern Europeans in particular bear, and the fact is that family isn't about where we are or who we come from. It's the behaviors and the stories that make us a family. When I was traveling with my dad, and my uncles at the end of my mission to meet with the extended family, it was so nice to hear the same stories over and over again, to talk about camping and fishing and hunting, and to adventure on. You can be in exile, but still have a family, and still be loved.