Memory and the Playground
A study
1.
I grew up in Almaty, in the 90’s.
During the summer, the temperatures sometimes rose up to forty-two degrees celsius. Weeks could go by without a single drop of rain. Trees started to yellow in July.
I used to spend entire days playing outside with other kids. Our playground, which had been built by a group of komsomol youths in 1984, was being demolished by older boys right before our eyes: each year, there would be less and less equipment for the children to play on.
The younger boys played football, kicking up sandstorms with their feet. Next to the playground was an overgrown yard, that some younger kids called “the forest” and where we sometimes hunted grasshoppers. There were a couple of wild apple trees, elm, and the most beautiful blue spruce I had ever seen, and which was eventually cut down by one of the neighborhood dads (so that the boys would have more space to play football, he said, even though the boys never played in that part of the yard anyway).
There were two birch trees right outside my kitchen window that my mom watered diligently during those dry days. She would go outside with a bucket of cold water in each hand, and douse the parched earth around the trees with it.
The house that I had grown up in was the first to be built, and the whole block sort of grew around it: three residential buildings, and a kindergarten. A chain link fence separated our yard from the kindergarten, because when the city had built the kindergarten back in the ‘80s, they had apparently broken some regulations, and claimed a large portion of our yard and our playground as their territory.
There was a hole in the fence that we used to sneak into the kindergarten in the summer. When I got older, they had replaced the chain link fence with a sturdy steel bar fence, which they had painted in pastel blues and pinks, and we were thus cut off from the kindergarten’s many playgrounds and gardens. Until someone had sawed off one of the bars, so that we could squeeze our way in.
That was our world. We picked leaves and grass to cook “food” in plastic bowls. We played out scenes from the Mexican soap operas we would watch with our grandmothers (and perfecting the art of the “fake slap” in the process). There was a large slide in the middle of the playground and we would run barefoot up and down the warm metal surface until we would run out of breath. And sometimes, we would fall and scrape our knees.
When we got hurt our go-to remedy was a leaf of plantago major, because - we had been told - it had healing powers. Lucky for us there was no shortage of plantago on our playground. Even as other plants were turning yellow and brittle in the summer drought, those broad dark-green leaves seemed to be thriving. Plantago grew through the cracks in the pavement, and in the gravelly dirt by the swingset, and in those precious islands of green that our feet hadn’t reached. It makes sense, then, that the Russian name for plantago major is “подорожник” (podorozhnik), or “that, which grows by the roadside.” So, almost all of us had, at least once in our lives, held a dusty, grimy, germ-ridden leaf of plantago major to our bleeding knees and elbows. And then we would go home where our moms waited for us with iodine and brilliant green.
2.
This post was heavily inspired by the book Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. In fact, I’ve been trying to write a proper review of it, but, not unlike its protagonist, I have ventured into some unexplored territory, and ended up with something different.
In this retrospection I have paid special attention to the plantago plant - an innocent symbol of my childhood, so to speak. At one point in the writing process, I wanted to dedicate this whole post to this miracle plant, and I went down the rabbit hole, learning so much about it. I have learned that it indeed has medicinal properties, and is widely used in herbal medicine. These properties have been known to people around the world for centuries, and have later been confirmed by science. So, in some ways, I felt vindicated for pressing those grimy leaves to open wounds when I was a child.
Thanks to my fellow writer Zhanna Esen (who knows our native tongue much better than myself) I have also learned that in Kazakh this plant goes by many names, like “қойқұлак” [qoyqulak] which means “sheep’s ear” and “иманжапырақ” [ïmanjapıraq] which literally means “leaf of faith” or “leaf of blessing” (probably a reference to its medicinal qualities).
If I were that kind of writer I would’ve drawn on-the-nose parallels between this resilient weed that possesses many good qualities and the children who have grown up in the turbulent post-Soviet ‘90s. But the truth is that despite that turbulence, my childhood was - for the most part - safe and happy. And since I can only write for myself, I didn’t go down that road.
P.s. I haven’t visited my homeland in twenty-five years, but a cursory Google search will show that our old playground has long since been renovated, and made safer, which makes me happy.
Sources:
Chemical constituents and medical benefits of Plantago major - Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy
Plantago major L. - fungi.su
Zhanna Esen of Family Ethnography