I will try to put two stories in one, because, as it turned out, they are very closely intertwined and influenced the life and worldview of two generations. And the third - (I) got out in the background, I try to tell you.
When we moved to live in a house and joyfully digged in the garden, Dad (namely, he initiated the move from apartment to house) never took a spade in his hands. When we tried to call him, we heard the same story: I already accumulated my own, my parents have a huge garden, only under the potatoes more than 20 acres, and plant more and more. First we plant, dye, gather bushes, collect potatoes, store (there were several warehouses), then we pick up until the moisture. In the end, most of it is thrown away. And then everything is new! Martyshkin's work, and why all this, but the father can't convince. Sage and all.
To some extent, I’ve heard this story. Usually after a trip to the village to his father, he observed the fact: the garden became larger. His two brothers were also surprised by this, but the older one pulled in and went to hunt the garden, perceiving it as a fresh air loading.
The second story is about Grandpa. To understand his life: in 1940 he went to the army. Soon the war began. But since he was a vision disabled from childhood, he was not sent to the front. They made him glasses with a lens thick in a centimeter (with them he went through his whole life) and sent to the Uralmash factory in Sverdlovsk. In Uralmache he eventually worked until his retirement. During the war, the factory made tanks. The shifts were up to 18 hours a day, sleeping right at the machines on wooden boxes. Moreover, the workshop did not stop the work, did not pay attention to the noise, just fell out of fatigue and hunger, so as not to waste energy on the way home. There was hunger from the very beginning and until the end of the war, grandfather almost died of hunger, and once after receiving a package of food from relatives from the village, he got a bowel wrench. He went to the hospital, there was lucky - healed and fed a little better.After the war with his wife built a house on the edge of geography, far beyond the city in a village near the swamps. Nearby lived relatives with whom he and his wife lived during the construction of the house: they themselves cut the bars and dragged on themselves. There was nothing, it was hungry and heavy. Then three sons were born, one of whom was my father.
All these stories I have heard, compared and thought many times. I remembered my grandfather, we communicated little, but from all this communication and all the information about him in general, I came up with the following: he was absolutely normal, if not counting the hobby of the garden. Therefore, somehow these words did not fit in the head. But the warehouses under the food I saw myself, including two practically in the forest.
Grandfather was gone and once dad again began to remember him and the garden: - Yes, you can live a whole year on the harvest, and in the spring everything was rotten and thrown away.
Here my puzzle began to fold. But to check the guesses, I began to clarify: and when did grandfather first start to increase the garden?
When my older brother went to town, he got married. And we are crawling here, we are crawling even more.
And then then?
And then when my second brother got married and left, I left alone for everyone. And then when my first niece was born...I understood everything!
War and famine affected my grandfather. Apparently, in order to be prepared for everything, he calculated how many foods a person needs to live a year and stockpiled. With the birth of a new member of the family, the reserves increased proportionally. He didn’t explain anything to anyone, just silently did something that could save the lives of his children, grandchildren and grandchildren, suddenly a war or disaster.
We uncovered the mystery of the garden, sad that it was so late.