After the revolution, the primary school curriculum hanged on to a (guaranteed-A) subject, called something like “manual labor.” Girls were separated from boys and had to learn how to knit, sew, cook and other girly stuff (thank god we didn’t have to weed corn or potatoes in the fields, like previous generations did).
In one particular class I will remember as long as I live, the funny old “labor” teacher, with her smiling eyes behind the retro geek glasses, asked us to bring several ingredients and “cherries in alcohol” to make a special recipe of cookies. My parents didn’t keep cherries in alcohol at the time (they are proficient now in preparing the drink), hence I had a bunch of colleagues volunteering to bring some for me. To my excitement, the next day I ended up having too many. After rolling several such spiked cherries in some cocoa mixture to make little candy balls, I thought I should try to see how they tasted. Mmm mmm, they were quite yummy. So yummy that I indulged with a few more. Wow, why did she wear two pairs of glasses now? A second later I blacked out, girls shouting around my table.
The teacher didn’t understand at the beginning, but she saw the guilty pits on my table and soon figured it out. She was baffled. So baffled she was laughing. She splashed some water on my face and laid me on the desk. I was quite tiny and skinny at age 11. I woke up feeling dizzy, hearing the teacher, “But why, mommy?” She would call all of us “mommy.” I soon found out that I was technically drunk. From five cherries. Later on, I felt sorry for the history professor who had to taste candies from all of the girls. We insisted, although we weren’t really washing our hands properly. He became unusually upbeat that day.
Original post: here.
Raluca is a 27-year-old PhD student, born and raised in the mountains of Romania, making sense of life in the swamps of hot Louisiana.