Translated material
Living is simple
It is sometimes useful to bring anxiety for the fate of the Motherland to the absurdity
It is sometimes useful to bring anxiety for the fate of the Motherland to the absurdity
Two weeks ago, Viktor Mikhailovich Lapshin, the head of the Red Army volost of the Zedarmeysky volost. Without any professional interest, so is a personal question. Relations allow. Three years like ...
How are you there?
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1 I understand that it sounds pessimistic. It's like a habit of asking: "Well, what's wrong with us?" Soft option: "How are you there?" And even Viktor Mikhailovich’s peppy voice does not immediately sleep this educated (I don’t know if, for years, maybe something genetic?) Anxiety. Moreover, the voice pronounces the unpleasant word "news".
Yes, everything is in order! There was a philanthropist, a wonderful person who got acquainted with the history of parents' struggle for school and presenting a whole computer class to the Malakhov school. The absence of this class in 2007 was almost worth the school. But the new class and its donor are, of course, the story is separate and pleasant.
I do not like the eternal context of anxiety, in which rural small schools are forever inscribed for me [ 2 ]. When I find myself on a “in the area” in the immediate vicinity of the rural school, I will certainly specify some internal questionnaire: how many children are studying, are there all classes at school, will there be first-graders next year? In the photo in the wall newspaper "Our graduates" automatically recount the number of these graduates. There are always few of them. I celebrate the age of the director - he (often she), as a rule, is younger than the teaching staff “on average”. And everything upsets: the village is coming, huge territories are emasculated ...
Over the same three years, only one rural school of the Pskov region managed to visit, which the most inveterate optimizer would not have called a small -complex one. True, several branches were already dissolved in it, a boarding school works ... a good boarding school: two rooms, a kitchen in which you can endlessly drive teas, a gym, a room for preparing lessons, televisions, computers, DVD all sorts of DVD. Children are very well dressed (even somehow with a break), a lot of toys in the rooms. It was thought: how did their parents get used to it ... And the school is very good, the director is correct, sincerely laughed at the question about the "accuracy" of his graduates: "Do you seriously believe that higher education is the main criterion for life success?" No, I don't think.
"Would you like to?"
I just have a secret and obvious dialogue with those who do not believe for several years - there is life outside the cities. They always have a number of sacramental questions: “And you would like your children to study in such a rural small -complex - school? Would you like them to live in the village? Do you know what kind of "contingent" is there? Are you sure that all these irreconcilable wrestlers for the light in school windows will not retreat from them, as soon as their children will learn under the parental wing? ”
And it is useless to explain that there is a personal choice. That if people desperately resist the closure of the school, then the need for its existence is not subject to discussion. That it is impossible to make it possible. That even if most of the graduates go to “act” with the intention of breaking and not returning, this does not mean that they really will never return. Even how they return. True, rather late than early. When they just want to live ...
This is probably the phenomenon of not only the Pskov region: in most areas from April and somewhere to October, the population has almost doubled. Due to summer residents. Moreover, not in the classical sense (shield housing, 9 acres, there is light, gas in cylinders), but in hereditary. Someone returns to the thorough parental houses (albeit for the summer), someone buys home (we have cheap).
This is before the start of the season in the open spaces of the Pskov region is quite deserted, if not lonely. With warmth it becomes much more fun. And do not grin skeptically: yes - the fields are unnecessary, the meadows are non -humble, the cows already do not hold the native residents (or hold while the children are small), the forests are undermined. There is no global revitalization, it is foolish to consider summer residents to be business entities, they are now hosting themselves not as in the dashing 1990s. Not peasants, not farmers. Just people who have overestimated such a thing as the quality of life.
The decrease in this quality is especially acutely felt by the children who just have just escaped to the city who are stuffy in city buses, closely in dormitory rooms, it is strange in rented apartments, where, like their personal, other people go to their eyes, which can never see in their eyes. But they will get used to it. They get involved in this big life for a long time, allowing themselves to come to parents only in order to catch their breath.
But the memory of the Earth is like muscle memory. I learned to ride a bicycle - you can’t see there. He knew how to live on Earth according to the circumstances of his birth - over the decades of another life, this skill can not be wasted. And not even longing for the air, in personal space, in subordination to the natural mode of work and rest, begins to take its own.
But this is a desire: to do something understandable, tangible in your life, that which has a really final result. It can be presented to yourself, like a bunch of radishes from his garden, as a can of canned cucumbers, as an embroidered napkin covering the TV screen (the grandmother got the custom - either so that the screen “does not fade”, or from dust) or a wicker basket.
It begins to suddenly cost more than the entire labor biography, where there was a diploma and the path from an ordinary employee to ..., there were tons of quarterly reports and plans. After all, it is difficult to explain to his grandchildren that this plant (now barely breathing) has built his grandfather. With a house built by a house or bath, everything is much easier ...
"Feeling of the Motherland, or what?"
Therefore, the question: "How are you there?" - An unpleasant question, in fact. You can hear in it: "Have you yet scattered yet?" And the alarming the graduates over the heads, and the assessment of the middle age of teachers at school is all from the same opera. The expectations of the end. Until you bring this expectation inside yourself: the imagination will draw an apocalyptic picture - everything is, but there are no people.
And suddenly it becomes funny. Because there are people. I want to believe in it. Just for some time, they were redistributed in time and space. And over this time, often not noticeable for themselves, they are delayed longer in their homeland. Or in the place that looks like it. The city exhales deeper. Everything for your country season. The grandchildren who, having matured, will be eagerly, will make every effort to avoid the next month of the grandmother in the village or already in the country. And, ripening, they will slowly return.
It used to seem that a prerequisite of this, even in a light form, but return is a birth in the village. But recently, a young colleague, a native city dweller, with resentment in her voice told how her parents sent for the whole summer to her grandmother to the Pechora district. There were no children in that village: “Of course, it was very fun for me ... I can understand my parents: sending to the summer camp-an extra nervous-rod. And there all the time under supervision. ” Then she thought: “And maybe they did the right thing. I sang with my grandmothers in the church choir. There was a lot of sun, loneliness. It was such ... a sense of homeland, or something? "
Ten years later, he will begin to look after a house in his homeland - in return for the sold grandmother's. Once a year it will change the whole world for several weeks of sun and loneliness.
Because, like many of us, you will want to live simply. Just live.
Someday these weeks will stretch for the season. And someone will become life. To - maybe! - become a life for children. Who will need their own rural school. For starters.
Elena Shiryaeva, editor-in-chief of the regional application “Arguments and Facts-Pskov”, observer of the newspaper “Pskov Province” in 2006-2008.
1 See: E. Shiryaeva. Goodbye homeland! // "PG" No. 27 (346) of July 11-17, 2007; E. Shiryaeva. Again defended // "PG" No. 28 (347) of July 18-24, 2007; E. Shiryaeva. Powerless omnipotent // "PG", No. 29 (348) dated July 25-31, 2007; E. Shiryaeva. (C) Consent of consent // “PG” No. 30 (349) dated August 8-14, 2007; L. Schlosberg. The road to the school // "PG" No. 30 (349) dated August 8-14, 2007; Three answers // “PG” No. 30 (349) dated August 8-14, 2007; E. Shiryaeva. They themselves defended // "PG", No. 32 (351) dated August 22-28, 2007
2 See E. Shiryaeva. For what? // "PG", No. 21 (390) dated May 28 - June 3, 2008