a change in seasons.
my father and i decided to take a short trip to visit the village my grandfather grew up in, named kestenovac, after the european chestnut trees that are native to the area. where spring used to mark a new block of life, as its residents, bunkered away in foreign regions for the winter, returned to tend to crops and begin the process of sowing new seeds, march twentieth now marks the thawing of cold, dead earth.
the fields reserved for visits by my family are now barren and gray, littered with the stumps of trees whose wood has been sold off for the lowest price or cut down due to disease and weevils. winter has thawed, but there is no sign of summer past this spring, it's warmth buried even deeper than the graves the old residents now lie in.
the death of this place has marked the premortem of family ties i had thought invincible. the bonds of two brothers closer than none, the confiding of sisters in law over shared frustration with their stubborn spouses, two cousins born a month apart to different mothers but referred to as coming from one. my wish is that this land may one day return to it's natural order. where families of deer prance across the same backyard my grandfather would mow sickle in hand, wild boars to trample through the same orchard we'd pick plums from in late july, falcons to fly through the same skies i'd look out onto during sunsets. let its life not be determined by presence of humans frail in time but by the breath of life dictated in the change in seasons