A Summer Where Time Stood Still
My grandmother’s village was a cozy little world of games and adventures when I was a child. I could roll down a hill into the soft grass, give myself a manicure with flower petals, play with baby rabbits, or float on an old tractor inner tube in the pond. The list could go on forever. In those pre-internet days, a child’s imagination knew no bounds.
How We Tried to Stop Time
While Grandma worked in the yard, my sister and I would make plans for the day, once again trying to come up with something to do. I was nine, and she was six. It was the early 1990s. The only gadget we had was a massive wooden wall clock with a pendulum. It set the rhythm of life for our entire family. Hanging beneath it was an oval white bas-relief portrait of Taras Shevchenko, almost like another icon in the house.
The clock had a little door that we would open with a tiny key whenever Grandpa wasn’t looking. We sometimes lost the key, too. The clock ticked so loudly that it got on our nerves, especially at night. So we decided to stop time.
Of course, Grandpa would notice by evening. He would ask whether we had anything to do with it. We would shrug and watch as he inspected the mechanism, set the pendulum swinging, and brought the clock back to life. Once again, it would start ticking away, making us “grow older.”
We believed that if we stopped the clock, our childhood would last forever.
Grandpa would glance toward our room and deliberately hold up the key before slipping it into his shirt pocket. We watched him through the crack in the door. Never mind. If we couldn’t stop the clock, we would stop time another way — with the telephone.
A large black rotary phone sat on a shelf inside the cupboard. It had no buttons. It was the kind of phone that could trap your fingers as you dialed a number. You also needed a bit of strength to dial an eight or a nine. One of our favorite pastimes was to pick a name from the phone book, call a complete stranger, and say nothing — or call our cousin, who lived on the next street over.
Sometimes we pulled so hard on the telephone cord, trying to drag the phone into our room, that we yanked it right out of the wall socket. Disaster. We would then turn ourselves into telephone repair experts, plugging it back in any old way. From the outside, everything looked fine. But for the rest of the day, no one could get through to Grandpa.
The moment Grandpa needed to make a call, our little schemes would come to light. As punishment, we were forbidden to touch not only the clock but the telephone, too. But with grandparents as kind as ours, such bans never lasted long. The phone would be fixed, and by the next day, it would be buzzing with calls again.
Later, when our parents had a telephone line installed in their apartment in the city, we finally had someone else to call: Mom and Dad. Their phone bills began to climb dramatically.
We usually called them in the evenings. We would call for Grandma, and she would come running from the summer kitchen, wiping the sweat from her forehead. Then she would give Mom a detailed account of our daily activities: how we slept in late, how we had become “city girls,” yet still helped out around the farm, hoeing the vegetable garden and picking strawberries.
Meanwhile, my sister and I would talk over each other, eager to tell Mom how much we loved it there. We didn’t want to go to the seaside. We wanted to stay in the village until September 1.
Our parents would arrive toward the end of August, and we would help dig up the potatoes. Just like that, our adventures would come to an end.
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But summer wasn’t over yet. There was still time.
Two Meters of Liver Sausage
July was the halfway point of summer, and we still had a whole world of adventures ahead of us. There were plenty of errands and discoveries to look forward to. We had to make trips to the kooperatsiia — the local word for the village shop — and on weekends, we went to the market, where you could buy just about anything from car-side stalls or vendors selling their goods on the grass. That was where we got treats, ice cream sold by weight, and watermelons.
My sister and I especially loved going to the shop on our own. Every trip felt like an adventure. One day, Grandpa asked us to buy a loaf of dark bread, some sweets, and liver sausage. For some reason, we decided to spend all the money left over after buying the bread and sweets on sausage. Liver sausage was cheap, so we ended up buying four kilograms of it.
We carried it home like a magnificent catch, delighted that such a small amount of money had bought us so much.
Several times along the way, we stopped to admire our purchase. We giggled, imagining how astonished Grandpa would be. And astonished he was. When he unwrapped the sausage and laid it out on the table, he was so surprised he nearly dropped into his chair.
What we saw wasn’t just a length of sausage. It was a string of sausage pearls, almost two meters long, dangling before our eyes like a living snake.
We laughed until we cried, counting the individual links and imagining that we could string them together into a gigantic necklace. It became the story everyone retold that summer.
We ate that sausage for a long time afterward, and every time we did, we burst out laughing all over again. After that little adventure, whenever we were about to head to the shop, Grandma and Grandpa would invariably remind us:
“No liver sausage!”
We would just smile, remembering the two-meter sausage necklace we had spread across the table.
To be continued…
Author’s Note
Originally published in Ukrainian as Тетяна Яцечко-Блаженко. “Білогородка. Літо, де зупинився час,” in Коло млина: альманах, edited by A. Shevchenko (Kharkiv: Ukr-Publisher, 2026), pp. 221–224.
Translated into English by the author.
Morning Dew. Photograph by the author.
© 2026 Tetiana Yatsechko-Blazhenko. All rights reserved.
