With Pavel in the barn

I’m standing with Pavel in the barn watching him clean the mousetraps under the rabbit cages and toss the dead mice into a pile by the door. Pavel is my girlfriend’s dad. Here in the Czech Republic you call people by their first name if you know them, so Pavel, not Mr. Veik as we might stateside.

The mice are smaller than I thought mice are. I thought mouse traps snapped further down the body. They actually snag just the head. I didn’t see any blood.

When you travel to North Bohemia where her parents live, you get the sense that it’s no-bullshit living. Pavel kills the mice so the mice don’t eat the rabbit food so we can eat the rabbits. Pavel shoots the birds in the cherry tree so we can eat the cherries. I wasn’t sure if it was actually even possible to kill a bird with an air rifle but birds rot like any other animal and one day I was walking in the garden and I followed the scent and came across a bird lying right there under the tree.

I have always had two feelings that I feel like are opposing. The one feeling that living things (animals, people, nature) are so beautiful and interesting. When I get in the right frame of mind like that (coffee helps), I feel like I’m seeing through things to how cool it is they’re even there at all. I get these intense overwhelming feelings of wonder. Then there’s the other feeling, the feeling that that’s shallow. That I might see beauty, but that I’m seeing just part of it. That there are things built into the nature of nature that aren’t beautiful at all. I’ve never killed a rabbit or any other animal for food, but I haven’t had to. It’s weird that there are two views of one thing. But maybe it’s about seeing both, or that it’s okay to some days see one, and other days the other. Or that maybe it’s okay to be confused about it. Maybe it’s supposed to be confusing. Maybe all that sounds obvious. Maybe it sounds nuts.

Anyway, the weekend was great. I wanna tell you more about Pavel and his wife Jana, my girlfriend’s parents, and how they came to be living here in Nová Ves v Horách. I’ll tell you later tho. This is long enough as it is. Stay tuned for more about them though. It involves Nazis.

Here are a couple other pictures I took up there:

pavla and her sister

pavla

the field behind their house