Shenandoah

When we moved to Frackville I liked to take a bus to Shenandoah. There I stopped at doughnut shop for coffee and and a doughnut. The shop had a large selection of doughnuts - at least twenty kinds: plain, sour cream, crullers, doughnuts filled with jelly, creams, apple crumb, long johns, even chocolate filled. I sat at little table, drank coffee and chewed the doughnut, absorbed atmosphere and tried to listen. I still didn't speak English. From time to time I caught a word, but a conversation still didn't make a sense. At next table sat two elderly ladies. We smiled at each other and ladies said something. I told them I do not understand and that I am from Czechoslovakia. Friendly ladies moved to my table and we began a conversation: about Galicia, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. About how their parents came to United States by the end of 19th century and how they have got married. Their husbands worked in the mines and women sewed in the factory, in summer they picked huckleberries, and a year around they looked for pieces of coal to sell and to heat the house. The old ladies didn't speak Polish, Slovak, or Ukrainian. They created their own language. It was something like Slavic Esperanto. Little bit of this, little bit of that. They adjusted, because they wanted to communicate.
I live here for thirty years now. Before Easter I went to look at pisanky. They are made of wood. On the wall hanged a handmade poster. Somebody wrote in Russian: Christos voskres. I read the words aloud and translated into an English. This way I met a gentleman who wrote it. We talked about Andy Warhol, Slovak and Moravian old ladies in rich costumes selling decorated eggs before Easter Na Prikopech St. and Vaclavske Square. I guess, this is also a history today.
I wanted to say thanks to the gentleman, so I said: Dzienkuje. The gentleman understood and he smiled. I do not know if it was in Polish or in Slovak. It was Slavic.

Copyright (c) Marie Neumann
Translated from Czech
Pottsville, 4/2011