the plotki magazine (pdf) - Moving Baltic Sea

S T O R I E S F R O M T H E S E A S I D E →7.Ksenia: My grandmother, Irina Vasiljevna, boughtthe house at the end of the 50ies. She was a lecturer ineconomics at the university. Our family has a long-establishedpedagogical tradition: my great grandfatherwas a dean of the Faculty of Philology, his father too a dean, professor of history. As for myself, I graduatedfrom the Faculty of biology, received my PhD and nowI’m a professor at the medical college. My sister, who is8 years younger than me, will defend a dissertation atthe Faculty of Law soon.All members of the family have a completely differentattitude towards the house in Narva-Jõesuu. By theway, I perceive this place not as a resort, where I have arest, bath and get some sun. It is a “Home” for me (withcapital letter) where I do live. In St. Petersburg our flatis situated on the ground floor, and the feeling, atmosphereof the places is rather similar. Switching betweenthese two homes is effortless; life for me isn’t dividedinto “city life” and “country life.” During the last yearsI spent the summer holidays in Narva-Jõesuu, theweekends and, more rarely, winter holidays. That’s possiblebecause my holidays match the student’s ones.Normally, my 11-year-old daughter Dina stays withme, she has many friends here natives from Narva-Jõesuu and Narva she can spend whole days in theircompany in the streets. Though we try to do homeschooling with Dina every day. Both children and I playthe piano in St. Petersburg it is too wet in the house tokeep the instrument here.For me the most pleasant pastime in Narva-Jõesuu,is housework and gardening. The question of the repair,reconstruction of the house constantly bothers us, yetI’m the only person in the family who desires to workhere and who has leisure time to spend the whole summerhere. The others come for a week or two, they donothing and it’s normal. I would have done the same intheir place. Yet it is unfair to dump all the troubles onme. That is why the progress of repair is slow and insignificant.Last year we changed the electric wiring only in our part though, so fire is still highly possible.The first period of my life in Narva-Jõesuu was in myearly childhood and my next visit took place 30 yearslater, in 2000. In the 90ies it was my father who keptthe country house for us nobody wanted to come52