The View Between Villages
The school year ended with the news of returning home. Not that it was new news, but it was still information that had to be taken in somehow. We were going back, and the war was still at hand.
What was new was all the events lined up for the summer: not only general meetings with church leadership but additional domestic projects and guests flying in from the States and Europe. Our travel to Ukraine would also be by new means, that being train travel, which was primary in my childhood when my sister and I would visit relatives in Chervonohrad (our mother’s hometown). Arbitrary, fuzzy memories of my little self in train cabins would slowly form into a tangible experience.
Our plane flight settled in Kraków, before we swiftly transitioned to a train that would take us to the border town of Przemyśl. There, our overnight train would depart the following day.
The town was small, quaintly settled like a distant memory some time ago. Upon our arrival, we tried to get some drinks at midnight and then turned in for a long-needed regular night in a hotel that, I must confess, quite sillily reminded me of the late-1970s Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show (a classic I would recommend).
We stretched our legs in the morning in preparation for the last leg of long travel ahead, wandering around the quaint town and its old cobbled streets. The normalcy of it all partially shocked me, and I boarded the old Soviet train in a bit of a reluctant daze. Maybe it was from the lack of sleep; maybe my body found the travel too exhausting.
The water heating system...
the station our parents used when dating each other between Lviv and Mariupol ;)
The Polish-Ukrainian border facility soon appeared outside our cabin’s windows, alongside plenty of figures: a pair of armed officers with a dog in tow, laughing lightly about something; then, half an hour later, a group of children making their playful rounds near the border facility. Trotting strays and wandering individuals seemingly far away from a raging reality even within the country itself.
arrival at the border facility means waiting for passport control :/
To me, at least, it didn’t make sense. It seemed I needed to make sure that there was indeed a war going amid everything.
We set off soon into the evening, passing village after village and the views between them - the blurred green of forests, continuous horizon lines of pastures, livestock bounding around, and people on their evening walks.
to live a life walking in the fields <3
And then, at a closer look, a military barrack every other glance; troops waiting to board the train at stops; and when closer to Kyiv, the bombed and burned homes.
wild horses and orthodox churches
The juxtaposition was jarring. The views flying by fast enough to leave me staring hollowly at the window, imprinted in my mind as the night set in.
We arrived in Kyiv early in the morning, everything in a blue haze. Taking the metro to a station just on the other side of the Dnipro River, we were picked up by a family friend and dropped off at our home at last. The view between villages left far behind us as we set off to work.
