Reymont's Hero

A few years ago I mentioned in one of the texts, that

I was spending my schoolboy vacation in a 19th-century
classicistic palace on a picturesque undulating upland1.
… These decorations, straight from a gentry romance novel,
were only part of my summer attractions.

My grandfather on the distaff side, a few kilometers away,

had a farm partly surrounded by forest
and situated above a valley cut by stripes of fields.
The grandfather was a 20th-century progressive man,
a farmer with the almost calligraphic type of penmanship,
who started in the light of the kerosene lamp
and ended amid the benefactions of electricity.

During the holidays on his farm - I, the townsman -

felt almost like a Reymont's2 young hero …
As the house stood at the top of the valley,
there was a lack of water, despite very deep well;
every few days it was necessary to get it from the source.
We were driving a wagon down a narrow way carved in the loess slope,
back, the horse was pulling the barrel uphill without passengers.

The ritual was profitable: the cows were giving still warm, fresh milk,
and later I have never eaten such good curd-cheese
like the one my grandmother was preparing.

MMXVIII

1 see page 44, ISBN 8182536405

2 Nobel Prize for the novel Chłopi (The Peasants) in 1924