In the past, when greater Europe was wallowing in the cruel injustices of medieval depravity, winter in Grigovia was a time of communal sharing, a period of cooperative productivity. Even under the Soviet juggernaut's yoke, the people of this landlocked little republic managed to help one another out in times of scarcity, through diligent effort and clandestine communication maintaining a vast network of charity-driven black markets.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the old traditions still hold, that, when the first snows begin to fall in the dizzying mountain passes, the older high-valley denizens seal up their homes and hop buses into town while their younger counterparts break out snow-shoes and cross-country skis. “One learns to go without,” said ten year old Rathma Eroyip as she was carrying an armload of seasoned burning wood to an elderly neighbor's house. “I, for example, have come to terms with no longer being able to bicycle to school, and I know I must soon learn to ski so that I might continue attending classes in Grissend, which lies three kilometers to the east of here.” Rathma allowed us to escort her for the rest of the morning, during which she helped shovel out someone's back door, assisted in the manufacture of a thick woolen quilt, and learned how to attach and adjust the bindings on her first pair of cross-country skis. (The young lady's family had just recently moved up into the hills, to: “toughen these kids up a bit, and prepare them for life's exertions,” according to their mother.)
Wherever this news team went, Grigovians appeared to be contributing to the communal good in meaningful ways. We saw citizens handing out thick woolen blankets by the truckload, distributing baskets of hard cheeses and pickled vegetables in primarily immigrant neighborhoods, holding canned food drives and generally going out of their way to live up the notion that “Twigs in bundles become pillars”, Grigovia's unofficial national motto. “Instead of spending tax dollars on fleets of vehicles to plow the roads and contaminate the land with salts, we buried all power and telecommunications lines and created in even the smallest high-valley village satellite nodes for essential services where citizens can obtain medical care, educational materials, access to the national Wi-Fi network, and the materials needed to craft warm items for sharing with their elderly and disadvantaged neighbors,” said Qutomar Rastoyend, spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior's Winter Division. “Furthermore, we have added new buildings and installed new beds to the network of Care & Comfort facilities that stretches from Grig in the south to Pyltagrad in the north-west, where old and infirm alike can bed down for the winter, if they should so choose.” So it goes all across this fine little land: people bettering themselves by first bettering others.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
