A Place of Mine………….shafts

A dreamy, almost surreal, description of my hometown.

A special place it was, that place which my eyes got to know first. A place of hope and despair, sometimes mixed with joy and sometimes with grief. A place, where the roughness of the underground never fit with the beauty and tenderness of nature. A place of boredom and excitement at the same time.

A cruel place I dare say it was, that small mining town.

For a long time I knew no other place than that. Set in the puzzle of hills and valleys of Zasavje, covered in greenery or snow that made my eyes rest upon it, though it was more often thought of as polluted, boring, uninteresting and sometimes even dead. I dare not deny pollution, but the matter about dullness and liflessness can undoubtfully be negated by those who have ever lived there.

I remember that in hot summers we children used to go down to the riverside to play. The water was always ice cold, and it felt good to soak our feet in it after a long day, or just to play silly games squirting each other, and then coming home wet to the skin, mad mothers yelling at us. But all the shouting never did the trick, and we would do it over and over again. In winters the story repeated, only this time we would go to the nearby hill for sledding. Snowy idyll under our feet would soon change into a puddle of mud, but nobody really cared. We had to have our fun there at that moment, and nobody ever thought about what mom would say at home.

The verdure of bushes or trees in the spring and the soft calm of it all in the wintertime were not even close to what was happening underground at all seasons of the year. The miners were doing what they were supposed to do in any case, and even if nature seemed asleep, life beneath the earth was unbelievably vivid. They were like ants, digging through the dirt, searching for valuable treasure that the earth was hiding; sometimes I even heard them when I went to sleep, because the moving of the wagons and the noise of the machines underground was so loud. They knew how dangerous it was to go down there, and at every shift you could hear the miners greeting each other with their famous: ˝Srečno!˝

Nowadays, you cannot hear those greetings anymore. They fell silent, and so did the machines underground which were the vital energy of the town for so many years.