Hi, I'm Nina Iordanova and this is the 19th edition of Something Good, a newsletter filtered through my 🧠, 🖐, and ❤️. Coming your way every two weeks, I hope you find something good here.
I went to Bulgaria with my mom for a week in October to a small town called Ovoshtnik. Population: 1,600.
It’s a 3 hour drive from the main airport in Sofia. The houses here are low and small, dirty white with red tiled roofs. Fruit trees arch over and through every fence, heavy with walnuts and figs, pomegranates and persimmons.
You can see the mountains no matter where you are. Wide and deep and blue, they feel like they circle the entire town. The air is fresh and crisp, the light golden. Not the warm golden of summer, but the clear and revealing light of autumn that illuminates every leaf, every detail.
Three generations of my family live in one house. My grandparents, my uncle and his wife, and their teenage kids. The house is heated with coal and firewood piled into a furnace in the basement. You can’t take hot showers until it’s lit, and you need to keep every door closed to make sure the heat doesn’t escape.
It’s where I grew up too.
In my grandparents’ part of the house, connected yet separate, there’s an old metal stove that’s the only source of heat. It’s kept lit with firewood by my youngest cousin, and it’s used to keep my grandparents warm, to incinerate odds and ends, and to warm food up in.
8 of us eat dinner together around a table in a room that’s so small that we can set up for dinner without anyone leaving their chair. One of my cousins can reach the fridge, the other can reach the cutlery. My aunt can reach the stove and my grandpa the napkins. My grandma can grab glasses and my uncle can reach the beers. My mom and I take all these things and redistribute them around the table. It’s a mini factory line that works with surprising efficiency.
There’s a lot of teasing and laughter, and one night my youngest cousin cuts in with a joke.
I was walking home from school with my friend and we got to a one-way street. I stopped her and checked the road in both directions before crossing. My friend looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s a one way street! Why are you looking both ways?” she asked.
“Listen, this is Bulgaria. I should be looking up as well!”
We all laugh and I make her tell the joke again and again throughout the week every time someone new comes to visit. It makes me laugh every single time.
“Listen, this is Bulgaria. I should be looking up as well!”
*
The backyard is huge - it’s a productive piece of land where my grandmother grows tomatoes and peppers, potatoes and cabbages, apples and pears, and all sorts of other fruits and vegetables. Most of them get eaten throughout the summer, but the best ones are saved for seeds for next year’s crop. Another portion is turned into preserves both sweet and savoury that last throughout the winter.
A Dogo Argentino called Rocky lives outside. He’s tethered to a chain so he can’t go too far, but he’ll whine and whine until you toss him a bit of whatever you’re eating.
Old cars are littered throughout the backyard, and three semi-domesticated cats roam there too. They’re small and affectionate except for the one that’s always ready to bite you if you try and pet her. They live outside too, except for the days that it gets very very cold. Then they’re allowed to sleep in the front entryway with the shoes.
We’ve got two chicken coops, one with a chicken that constantly escapes. She scales to the top of the hen house, takes a running leap, clears the fence and start to wander around just outside. She never goes too far. My cousin and my grandma have a practiced routine of how to get her back inside through a mix of bribery and intimidation.
*
My mom and I wander through an open field where my grandpa and uncle have planted acres of roses to sell for their oil. The roses have been left to wilt and seed because prices have dropped so much over the past year that tending them no longer makes sense.
My mom leads me up a trail and down a small street, showing me the path she’d take on her bike when she worked as a country vet. She tells me stories of the farms she visited, a kleptomaniac she hired, the process of shearing sheep, and how she dreamed of being able to do this all her life.
We see a lone horse appear then disappear between a strand of trees. Curious to see where it went, we cross through the brush at the edge of the field and come to a ravine. One apple tree is half-sunk into the soil at the bottom, somehow untouched. Each branch is laden with round red fruit, like something out of a picture book.
We pick three apples to take home. My mom peels them, picking out the bird-pecked bits and the brown spots. She passes a slice to my grandpa, a slice to me, a slice for herself.
The apples are fragrant and tough. They suck the spit out of your mouth but they taste like spring itself. A sweetness, a promise, a delicate fragrance that builds and builds.
My grandpa doesn’t like them.
My mom and I eat and eat and eat.
✨
Warmly yours,
Nina
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