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White to move and mate in two #642 - On Freedom [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-20
The fields are calming in their familiarity and inviting in their difference, a more colorful Midwest spilling out into a saltwater sea—one that in childhood I knew from the stories of Iphigenia and Prometheus. We sometimes had a row or two of sunflowers, but I had never before walked between fields and been able to see only sunflowers and blue sky. I met farmers earlier today who had de-mined fields with improvised equipment and got some of their crops in. The farm machinery was mostly familiar, although I had to be told that some burned-out chassis were once John Deere tractors. One farmer had a Ukrainian trident mounted where I would have expected a weathervane.
They have been tough and ingenious, these farmers, and they have also had help. It took an army (supported by Ukrainian civil society) to de-occupy this land. The bunkers and trenches are still here to be seen. An international foundation provided some of the combine harvesters. The farmers had laborers, all of whom had stories, some very traumatic, of Russian occupation. As we sit and eat slices of watermelon, one of them calls the occupiers “rashysty,” a Ukrainian neologism that means “Russian fascists” and is a play on words in several languages. This reminds me that these farmlands, once steppe, are precisely where Indo-European languages began. Ancient Greek, Shakespeare’s English, the Ukrainian we are speaking now, indeed the languages spoken by almost half of the people alive today—all have their origin right here.
The farmers give us gifts of watermelons. They fill the turnk; some are now riding next to me in the back seat. My friends and I will take them back to Kyiv and give them away as gifts. As much of the Kherson region was de-occupied in late 2002, watermelons became a sign of joy, of the unity of the country. During this horrible war, when almost everyone in Ukraine seems to be grieving, people here seem all the more attached to small gestures of solidarity, all the more open to saying what actually matters, to enunciating the small virtues of everyday life, which are no less real than the mines in the fields.
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