Still Standing

I take a grainy photo from my tiny airplane window, en route to Toronto, Canada from Kyiv, Ukraine. British Airways serves us eggs with pickled vegetables for breakfast or maybe open faced mini sandwiches topped with sliced cucumber, cheese, and meat. Whatever they serve us, I eat every bite, as if devouring the last of the city I have grown to love makes it part of me.

Finding refuge from a late spring snow, I pile my plate with potatoes, cheese, meat, and dough in a restaurant in downtown Kyiv that serves the best perogies I’ve ever eaten. Dinner is topped only by the cherry pierogies for dessert. (My memory of those sweet, tangy perogies, staining my plate and my lips, is as vivid as any photo.)

I am invited into a family’s modest apartment somewhere in Kyiv. The table is spread with tea and cookies. The aroma of fresh blini wafts from their kitchen. After supper, we do a prayer walk through their home. (I wonder if I’m looking into their kitchen every time I scroll past images of an apartment buildings with bomb-shaped holes gaping in silent screams.)

Wandering through shops, I hand over worn hyrvnia, mostly in exchange for mystery-flavoured packages of chocolate labelled in an alphabet I can’t decipher and small tubs of the creamiest yogurt with the fruit sauce on the side. These bills buy me wooden Easter eggs painted with the most intricate designs and little wooden dolls, nestled one inside the other. (I turn one of these weathered bills over in my hand, the one that made it back to Canada in my luggage, tuck it back into my Bible, somewhere in 2 Corinthians, and am reminded to pray.)

I stare into the eyes of Ukrainian students whose schools I visit and in whose cafeterias I sip sweetened tea and dined on borscht and buttery mashed potatoes. (Flipping through photo albums nearly two decades later, I realize they’re all grown up now. I wonder if they are in the military, fleeing the country with babies in their arms, or giving birth in basement bomb shelters.)

In returning to this collection of stories and photos and calories and souvenirs often in the wake of February 24, I realize I am missing something important: a photo of Kyiv’s blooming chestnut trees.

Legend has it city officials planted them in anticipation of a mid-1800s visit from a Russian emperor, in an effort to impress him. When he disapproved, the trees were uprooted and tossed aside. Not wanting to let perfectly good trees go to waste, Ukrainians gathered the uprooted saplings and planted chestnut trees in their neighbourhoods.*

More than a hundred years later, their umbrella-like clusters of oblong leaves and flower cones dotted with pink and white blooms still line the streets of the city every May. Witnessing decades of wars and depressions, revolutions and pandemics, they’re a stalwart fixture of Kyiv.

Whenever I see a chestnut tree, I think of Kyiv.

It’s winter now and, with grey bark and bombs falling around them, I suspect they barely look alive. But, although assaulted by winter and barren, I also know they’re waiting for spring.

I like to think of those chestnut trees standing tall and defiant under Kyiv’s warm March sun, not unlike her people. I like to imagine that the buds the trees laid in the fall, before Kyiv knew this war, are readying themselves to bloom even in the midst of the chaos, and I pray they are still standing in May.

*uadestination.com/kpi.au