When Cherries Were Giants and Apples Fed the Hogs: Memories of a 1990 Village Garden

I was twelve years old the first time I ever laid eyes on a traditional masonry stove. It was 1990, right after my grandmother returned to her roots in Ukraine and bought back her family’s old homestead. It was just a breath before the Soviet Union fell, but back then the borders were still completely open, no visas, no passport checkpoints, no customs. My brother and I would take trains and hop flights from Kazakhstan to spend a month or two of our summer school break with grandma. Those were good times.

That first summer, I slept on top of the masonry oven ledge. I still fit up there back then. Later on I hit a growth spurt, outgrew the length of the shelf, and my little brother took over the spot. Bread and hand-pies baked inside that hearth, or homemade eggplant and zucchini spread slow-braised right in the embers inside a raw earthenware pot, were an absolute revelation. I still remember the first time I saw pies come out of that oven: baked to a perfect, uniform golden crust on every single side. We didn’t fire it up every day since it was peak summer heat; daily meals were mostly cooked on a gas ring, and that was how I, a city kid, discovered that propane comes delivered in heavy metal cylinders.

What blew me away most was the orchards. Around the village houses, alongside massive vegetable patches (easily over half an acre each), everyone had sprawling fruit orchards, often 6,000 to 7,000 square feet or more. Apples, plums, pears, sour cherries, walnuts, cherry plums, mulberries… never saw any quince, though. Before that summer, I always assumed sour cherry was just a modest shrub or a small knee-high tree. Boy, was I wrong. At grandma’s place, they were trees. No, scratch that: TREES! Taller and wider than our apple trees back home.

And the trunk on the mature Persian walnut tree was so massive it took three of us kids holding hands just to wrap our arms around it. The main crotch formed a natural, full-sized lounge chair high in the air. Aside from sleeping, running wild through the village lanes with the neighborhood kids, or helping grandma, I spent practically every waking hour up in those branches.

I harvested sour cherries with a glass canning jar slung around my neck on a strip of cloth bandage and a five-gallon bucket on a rope. I would pick cherries into the jar, dump them into the bucket balanced securely in a branch fork, and once full, lower the bucket to the dirt below, looping the rope over a sturdy limb like a makeshift pulley. Grandma dried most of the cherries right inside the baking chamber of the hearth, leaving them on the warm brick shelf to finish curing before boiling the rest into thick preserves.

I climbed the pear trees too, though you had to tread lightly there because pear wood is brittle and snaps without warning. But the walnut tree was my personal reading sanctuary. Persian walnut bark is thin, finely grooved, and delicate to the touch. Even though it is solid wood, it feels soft and velvety under your palms. Curled up in that branch crotch with a paperback was pure heaven. Plus, the canopy was so dense it barely let a drop through during summer showers.

It was also in Ukraine that I first saw windfall apples fed to… the hogs. There was simply such an avalanche of fruit that families couldn’t eat it all, and preserving every basket was physically impossible, so all the windfall apples, plums, pears, and green walnuts were hauled straight to the livestock.

The village even had community orchards. Well, not orchards on purpose: in the local public parks, instead of just planting standard oaks, birches, maples, and aspens, they planted cultivated apple, pear, and cherry trees. Trouble was, there was rarely anyone around to pick them. I remember during an open-air concert in the park, a no-nonsense local elder barked orders at all the younger kids to scour the grass and gather the fallen apples into neat piles. He loaded two burlap sacks into his cart for his own animals, and left plenty of piled fruit behind. He told us someone else would come grab the neat piles for their cows, but nobody was going to go crawling through tall weeds under the branches to pick them off the ground.

He was the collective farm director back then, so watching good food rot uselessly on the dirt cut him like a knife to the heart. He wasn’t just a neighbor either, he was my great-uncle, grandma’s youngest brother, Uncle Fedya. He was the spitting image of a real-life homesteader: thrifty, organized, and hardworking. The last of that older generation who stayed put, never leaving his native village or the family land. The rest of the siblings scattered across Ukraine and Russia, and grandma ended up all the way out on the steppe of Kazakhstan.

Edited January 11, 2021 by Oksana Evgenievna

I also vividly remember the white storks. One family, or really an entire generational lineage of birds, lived right on our lane for decades. Around here, storks are believed to bring good fortune, so that pair was the crown jewel of the neighborhood, treated like a lucky talisman and practically kin to everyone living on the street. Generations of villagers came and went, but the family names stayed the same, and those birds always felt like they had been there since the dawn of time.

In truth, the very first mating pair built their stick nest in an old tree standing across from my great-grandfather’s house long before World War II. At least, both grandma and Uncle Fedya swore they remembered those exact storks from their earliest childhood days. Back in his day, my great-grandfather strictly forbade his restless older boys and their neighborhood buddies from ever climbing that tree to peek at the nestlings or disturb the birds in any way.

When the war arrived and the German frontline swept through, there were heavy bombings, artillery strikes, and house fires all around, yet our entire street came through completely untouched. Not a single home was hit, even while neighboring roads were reduced to rubble. Call it superstition or luck, but it was an undeniable fact: not a single fire, not a single collapsed roof on our lane ever since those storks took up residence.

Then, in the early 1990s, during a vicious late-winter thunderstorm with gale-force winds, a blast of wind ripped the heavy nest from the canopy, and lightning struck the tree, burning it to the ground.

Uncle Fedya, who was still serving as the village farm director, immediately requisitioned a massive concrete utility pole. The local shop mechanic welded a heavy steel nesting platform to the top, and the entire neighborhood banded together to hoist and secure the pole right where the old tree had stood. They cemented it deep into the ground forever. They recovered the salvageable parts of the nest, hauled them up, and wired them down securely to the top platform.

Sure enough, spring arrived, the storks flew in from their migration, and they stayed.

To this day, that lane is famous for that towering concrete pillar built solely to support that bird family. Even looking up from the dirt road below, the nest is massive. I still remember the living tree from my earliest visits, and then one summer I arrived to see the giant pole and heard the whole story of how it got there. The elders were terrified the storks would abandon the spot, after all, cold concrete isn’t a leafy tree. But they came home anyway.

Edited January 11, 2021 by Oksana Evgenievna