Grandmother’s Rushnyks

In the village of Romanivka, where tree shadows fall differently than anywhere else and time moves both forward and backward, there stood a wooden house scented with bread, sun, and old cherry liqueur. Its walls were built not just from timber, but from the breath of generations. There lived the boy’s grandmother, whose veins ran like the dry riverbeds where once the blood of gods had flowed.

She had rushnyks — woven ritual cloths — each guarding more than memory. Woven into them were songs of voices never recorded, the rustle of rye bending as souls passed by. She said one rushnyk protected from forgetting, another from the wind, a third from separation. And that one day, the boy — he was seven then — would have to choose one, without asking why.  

Summers in Romanivka felt like an old dream: the ripening rye fields, tall as his shoulders, whispered stories the boy could not yet understand, but remembered with his skin. He would lie among the stalks, pressing his ear to the earth like to the breast of a sleeping giant bird, and hear his ancestors speaking beneath the layers of time.

Every morning, his grandmother placed a fresh rushnyk on the windowsill, as if someone came visiting through dreams. The boy would study the patterns — red like a heart beneath tree bark, black like the sky before a storm. These designs were not decorations. They were doors.

Years passed. The boy grew up, moved far away, and every window he opened had a different air, a different sky. But in one place — a place now called Giraffehome — he hung an old rushnyk. He knew his grandmother’s hands still held him, firm as ever, even from afar. And the thread of that rushnyk was not just fabric — it was the continuation of a path that once ran through rye.  

Since then, this new home breathes too. In the cracks of the wooden floor, one can hear rye rustling. In the morning light, a pattern appears that wasn’t there the night before. And in the most unexpected things — a kettle, a shelf, the bristles of a brush — ancient memory stirs.  

This is not nostalgia. It is a bridge. And the rushnyk — it’s not decoration. It’s a word spoken not by the mouth, but by the heart.

Can you hear it too?