star istevnik

The old woman climbed up the wooden ladder, stick-cane left leaning on the side of of the barn. Green patterned robe and viridian apron jovially standing out against the sun-bleached dung-plastered walls, part wooden-beams, park crooked brick. Her vivaciousness and an unbreakable lust for life kept her walking, sane and insatiably curious about the details of everyone else's lives, anyone who cared to share. Perhaps that curiosity in turn served at the fuel and engine for her beating heart. six, seven planks up, she was able to peer into the blanket and hay floor, walnuts scattered, drying, slowly eaten at breakfasts for a lack of a warm meal, yet in their own way a luxury. open walls let the low autumn sunlight graze the blankets, keeping out mold and letting the sharp macedonian frost settle and reign at night. information gained, the old woman climbed down, and tossing fruity macedonian phrases out of her musty rare-toothed mouth, she proceeded to examine the house and the few adjacent shack structures, containing preserves, dishes, tools and other unnamable but inevitably useful things. Refusing coffee (for the reason on having had one earlier that morning), turning down a cigarette (to my surprise, since most old women passing through maja's yard require one of us to produce a fag) and passing by an offered apple (both sets on front teeth are missing), the woman whose name I gathered to be Polka, asked a few more general neighborly questions, shared with me in hand and facial expressions a gentle reproach toward the ever-barking Johnny (or Jonka) and went on her way, through the vegetable garden and out the opening in the old fence and into the labyrinth of village houses and yards, through which she navigated with the mastery of an old wind-worn sea captain.