culture

my great grandparents family names are cooper, edwards, hall, mccolly, schlagda, beno, primic, and czomplak...eastern and western europe have come home to roost in me and mine ( my kids have the added flavor of names like sowa and yacko added to their gene pool)today would be my carpatho-rusyn granny's one hundred and twenty first birthday ( this is anna czomplak we're talking about ) this year is also the centennial of her arrival here from what was the austro-hungarian empire when she immigrated...she was an atypical granny on wilson street and i have come to the conclusion that it was because she brought a culture with her to indiana ( not that the old folks on the other side of the family did not have something of a nineteenth century air to them...the bulk of my grandparent's generation were born in the later nineteenth century [granny was twenty-one in 1912] and they had a much more relaxed view of time as i recall...they really did time things with a calendar...i miss that sometimes )she came form a small village called nizhne chabine ( which means "near chabine"..a podunk wide spot in the road...cousins tell me that nizhne chabine exists no more...chabine has subsumed the nearness and it part of the town now)and parts of the village came along...easter eggs for instance...for weeks before orthodox ( "real" in her eyes...just like our christmas, easter was a false festival..off by several weeks form the true date)easter shed gather peels form yellow onions in a paper bag and on an auspicious day she's put them in a pot of water with some salt and vinegar and boil them up for dye (she sneered at our paas)...she'd heat some bee's wax up in a pie tin on the stove and with a straight pin stuck in an old crow cork she'd make designs on raw eggs with the wax...then she'd dip ( not hard boil) the eggs in the dye...the resultant designs all had some significance in her hagiography...but she'd end up using the eggs anyway...what culture i possess i gained form granny in the years she lived with us...i like the folks form the old country i knew...mostly gentle people who seemed a bit lost at times in an endearing way...their kids turned their back on the "old country" for the most part ( although my mom still speaks carpatho-rusyn )...perhaps that was part of the loss...happy birthday granny.