The Interesting Discovery — follow up to September 27, 2013 missive

Since several of you have asked what the discovery was… so here it is, and I won’t discuss it tomorrow.

About 30 years ago when Mike and I went to then-Czechoslovakia for the second time — visiting a Czech planner (Lallin) who had lived in Finland when we lived there — our friend, Lallin, took us on an unexpected journey. We had visited him and his family a few years before and when we met his parents they asked where Mike’s family is from since they recognized the (somewhat Anglicized) name “Pyatok” (probably Piatek). Mike didn’t know, but when we returned to the states he asked his mother and she said that Mike’s grandparents (both paternal and maternal) were from a place called Maly Lipnik. So, when we reappeared a few years later, Lallin set us on a journey that he took with us.. and unknown to us, he plotted a route to get us to Maly Lipnik (a place he had never visited). When we got there.. and saw the village sign on the roadside we laughed, took pictures and figured that was that.. But Lallin had bigger plans. He wanted to knock on doors in this tiny, very old-fashioned town and see if he could find Mike’s relatives.

So he knocked on doors and speaking Czech was able to engage in conversations.. At one door, the woman seemed very animated and Lallin was talking a lot, so we thought we had uncovered a long lost relative.. but alas Lallin said that the woman was so excited that someone had come to visit from Brno (second largest city in Czech), since apparently the village had been long forgotten in its mountain location and being quite Catholic and not pro-Communist… so he couldn’t even tell her about us because he thought she’d have a heart attack. Anyway, we did find a cousin or something on Mike’s father’s side. The town was divided by a creek.. on the day we were there, the men were involved in horse trading (much of the agricultural work was being done by horse) and the women were washing clothes in the stream! (just imagine Mike trading horses and me washing clothes in the stream!).. anyway, it was an interesting trip.

So, as I planned this journey to Bukowsko… and was looking at the location on the map, it dawned on me that the town was very very close to the Slovakian border. Mike then got interested in the location and its proximity to Maly Lipnik. Turns out that (by the way the crow flies), the two villages (Bukowsko, Poland and Maly Lipnik, Slovakia) are about 60 km apart. So perhaps we met in another life.. but I don’t think I was the one washing the clothes in the stream. Perhaps I was the woman protesting the fact that the women were doing the washing while the men were having a good time, drinking and supposedly trading horses.

That’s it.

Fern