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Gaida works as a bookkeeper at a florists' in Riga. So she always knows where to go to get the best deals. On the way out, we made a left just before getting off the Riga ring road where it splits between heading west and going to the Jurmala seashore. We stocked up at a large nursery and we were on our way! |
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We whisked by Mordanga, picked up Ruta (Janis' wife) and headed off to Muiznieku Kapi, the local cemetery, to take care of Janis' and my great- great- grandmother's grave sites. It can be quite a stirring place, with its bell tower and rusting old crosses seeming to stand guard. |
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Even the wildflowers stand quietly, placidly as if in mourning, paying their respects to the departed.
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I dug out the corner of my great-grandmother's plot for Gaida to plant some flowers. Unfortunately, the shovel was a bit old and the wood decayed—the next thing I knew, I had snapped it off! After a moment of flustration (that's flustered frustration!)—no problem! I scoured the trunk of Arno's car, found some tools—a small hack saw, a screwdriver—and set about repairing it, whittling down the end of the handle with my trusty Swiss Army™ knife.
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It wasn't until I had finished putting the shovel together that I looked up to gaze out at the serenity which could be found just across the path along the cemetery's edge. |
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The porch of the mill-house had been falling apart, and we had hired a carpenter to fix it, along with various leaks in the roof. The lumber all came from what had been sawn and aged in our own little sawmill. |
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It was a nice, neat job, but, my mother remarked when she saw the picture, she had hoped more for "repair"—the replacement was the same size and shape, but it had none of the simple ornamental details of the one my grandfather had built when he added a second story to the house. One of my little handyman fantasies is to reconstruct it just like the original. I'm just not sure of the wood, birch for Latvian, or cedar for longevity! |
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At the end of the mill-house, the old turbine, installed by my grandfather, had been extracted, piece by piece. Together, it probably weighed at least half a ton or more. |
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One of the problems working on it was that there was no place to let the water bypass the turbine. They had tried to excavate the old bypass ("brivsluzas"), but found the roof caved in halfway under the road. A makeshift dam allows them to run the water off, then hold it back to allow work until the next rain. |
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There it was, the very heart of the turbine, fan blades rusted but still intact. Owing as much to fears for its delicacy as much as a general lack of any sophisticated power tools, it was wire brushes and gingerly applied hammer and chisel which were being used to reveal the turbine under the rust. |
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The turbine housing cover—capable of enduring some serious hammering—bore an inscription in Russian—it was manufactured while Latvia was still part of the Tsarist empire: G. PIERVIERD (?) & Co. RIGA 1910 . As my mother recalls, it was installed about 8 years later. |
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It was a pretty hot day. I decided to try and cool off a bit inside. Actually, I had to go inside anyway to climb up to the attic to measure replacements for the broken window panes. In a country where a municipality can force you to tear down your house because someone complained it's an eyesore, it's better safe than sorry, even if the mill house isn't that usable right now. (They electricity was cut when a tree working under the road and into the foundation was chopped down.) |
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Measurements all done, safely written into my address book so I don't lose loose slips of paper (have I mentioned I'm the Post-It™ king?), I went out around back to see how Gaida was doing with more planting. These are some of the samples from Mordanga's little flower garden. |
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It was still a little while until dinner, so, camera in hand, I wandered around a bit, though not too far. In past years, I would blithely hike all through the woods around the lake, but Latvia has the same problem with deer ticks and Lyme disease as apparently everywhere else in the world. |
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I wasn't dressed for deep woods exploring, so I stayed close to home. |
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After a quick dinner, it was back to Riga, an ever-present stork looking us over on our way home. |
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