Love Over the Mountain

This is a love story that began over twenty years before the protagonists met. It seems implausible but I hope to prove it true. The main characters are a boy and a girl (this time) who were born in the middle of the last century in a small country on the eastern edge of Europe, Romania. A country full of contradictions, just one to tell you to understand the permanent problems it faces.

Romania is the only Latin country in Central-Eastern Europe and the Balkans and it is also the only Latin country with a Christian Orthodox religion! For those who don't know, all Latin countries are Christian Catholic.

In other words, the Latin language makes us related to Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and religion makes us related to Greece (which is not bad, I am a big fan of Greece) and Russia!

In order to continue the love story, I have to say something more about the geography of the country. Romania is crossed from the southwest to the north by the Carpathian Mountains, which then cross into Ukraine. The mountains divide two large regions of the country, in the west Transylvania and in the north, beyond the mountains, is Moldova.

At this point, I must also talk a little about history. Transylvania was for a thousand years under Hungary and then Austro-Hungary and Moldova was a larger region but in 1940 more than half of it was annexed to Russia in what is now called the Republic of Moldova.

In 1918, on 1 December, Transylvania, Moldova, and the Romanian Country were united and thus the modern Romanian state came into being.

Romania, even if it is a member of the European Union, is a little-known country in the world and for this reason, I have brought this information so that the following story can be localized.

The Little Girl

In Transylvania, at an altitude of 800 m is a small village forgotten by the world, a village practically buried in greenery.

People are poor, they live with many deprivations and without comfort but this doesn't seem to be difficult because they are used to living like this, this is all they have seen since they were born.

The roads are overgrown with grass, you can only see the tracks left by the wheels of the carts.

In this village, called Garbau, the little girl I mentioned earlier had only two options. First, like all children in the village, she helped her parents with the work in the house and garden and the second option was to play. Without toys, because there were none in the village, she played in the garden.

With no shoes on her feet and no fear of injury, she ran through the tall grass, picking flowers and fruit.

From spring to autumn, from morning to evening, she was in the garden or on the road in front of the house, playing with the village children. She was lost among the grass, flowers, and trees, she knew every path that led to the fountain or the river, she knew the little animals and insects that ran through the grass.

She wasn't afraid to hang out alone in the garden, in the woods. Nature was part of her nature and was an ally and a friend. This child loved the wild nature around her without realizing it... until much later.

This kind of life, spent in nature, came to an end when her parents had to leave the village. They moved to the city, even to the country's capital, primarily to give their daughter a chance to go to school. After that moment nature was only in her soul and memory and she never left there!

The Little Boy

On the other side of the mountains, in Moldova, on the outskirts of a small town called Falticeni, a little boy lived with his grandmother. The outskirts of the town was a village itself, lost between hills and forests.
His parents had left the village for Bucharest, the capital of Romania, to find better-paid work.

Grandma was a wonderful woman and, of course, did everything she could to make that child happy. When is a child happy? When they're playing! So the child was all day long, from morning till evening, in the fields, hills, and woods around the village.

In those days the village was full of children. They would gather and go to the field, sometimes with their animals, i.e. sheep or cows, but most of the time for playing. Standing so much in nature, in the open air, without them realizing it, they were contaminated by nature. Nature meant freedom, they didn't know it then but they found out later.

Nature was a hiding place, it was a protection, it was a way of life, again I say, without them understanding it, being so busy playing.

As is often the case, what is good does not last long. The boy's parents took him to the big city to get access to a better school. That's when the boy understood that he was in love with nature, that it would remain in his heart and his desire to return. Well, once gone, you stay gone. The happy old days never return.

Ten years later!

After finishing school, the girl and boy in this story met, with the help of mutual friends. It was love at first sight, they got married and then visited their childhood places. Then they noticed with surprise how much nature resembled the two villages, 200 km apart and separated by the Carpathian Mountains. Then they noticed that they loved the same nature, the nature that lived in their souls. They understood that they had loved each other since childhood, without knowing each other, without knowing of each other's existence.

We have been married for 43 years. She, Magda is from Transylvania and I, Dan, am from Moldova. We both love nature! Nature united us even if we didn't know it. It did well, it's true that nature is never wrong!