Lacul Mija // the places we find ourselves
I’m going through these photos now, memories of just a few months back but life here has been moving fast, and already August feels like a distant reality. This morning I looked out my fifth-floor windows to see frost adorning every green stretch of ground below me—the year’s first frost, I believe. I am recovering from a mild case of covid that hit me early last week, and so I am isolated here, unable to venture outside to enjoy these last weeks of October in the mountains. But I can’t complain. I am healthy. I am warm. I am safe. And I am here, back in this country that has become home to me.
Looking at these pictures, all that I can think is, how did I end up here? How is this my life? (I ask these questions in a very positive sense, because I love my life here.)
On that particular day, one of my coworkers and I drove two cars of kids from our gym in Vulcan over and up to the nearby Parang mountains for a hiking excursion—a reward for those who had been faithfully attending some of our summer education programs. The day was hot and glorious, and though the hike was a pretty massive one to tackle with a bunch of kids, the beauty of that place was unparalleled.
“The mountain is the magic worker that shows you the true splendor of nature! // The mountain is the final explosion of the greatness of nature.”
We walked along the sides of great sloping scrubby hills, stopping more than we should have to collect handfuls of wild blueberries. I’ve said before that living in Romania sometimes feels like living in a storybook, and I still feel that way. Not in a sugar and spice sort of way, but in a very quirky, almost unbelievable, sometimes delightful, sometimes gritty, always intriguing kind of way. For example, there I was, alongside my coworker called RoRo and her friend nicknamed Cookie, leading a rag-tag band of colorful kiddos through some larger-than-life mountains, following trail markers that looked like eggs (a yellow circle inside of a white one) towards a glacial lake called Mija. And, of course, we befriended a giant dog along the way. My childhood self would be just beaming.
Sometimes, the places we find ourselves are astonishing.
We ate lunch by Lacul Mija, some skipping stones, others slipping their bare feet in the frigid waters, and then we pretty quickly had to hoof it back the other way so that we could make it back to the chairlift in time.
The day wasn’t perfect of course. We had a pretty severe health scare, and the hike back to the chairlift was anything but relaxing, and I got a wicked sunburn on my legs—socks to shorts, the kind that is so embarrassingly bad it literally turns heads on the street—but it all turned out okay. It was a very good day, which became a very good memory, one that I’ve been able to carry into the here and now of today. And that feels like a pretty astonishing gift when I think about it. An early August day warms a late October one, and the places we find ourselves overlap and intermingle until we don’t quite know where one begins and the other ends.
I think it’s because there’s not really an end. Places continue being places after we leave them, and we continue being ourselves. There is a sense of continuity that is comforting, and besides this, the knowledge that we carry the residual imprints of each other, no matter how minuscule.
It is nearing midnight and I am still warm in my apartment, but Lacul Mija sits quiet above this valley, frigid under a spray of stars. The grass that was disturbed by our feet still grows crooked. The crumbs from our bread have been absorbed into the dirt, or into the stomachs of birds. The flat stones that we flung from her shore lie now in the depths of her waters. And I like thinking of those stones—the ones we ran our thumbs over, the ones that felt the grooves of our skin—that will sit for centuries in a new place because of our hands.
