Aubergine time: A day in 1980s Romania

Abstract This piece of creative nonfiction originates from a desire to salvage characters and situations that are slowly disappearing in Romania, for natural and social reasons, from aging to emigration. For decades, especially as part of the processes of industrialization and urbanization during socialism, children left villages in search of opportunities to study and work in towns and cities around the country. Their own children would return to these villages during their school holidays and would stay with their grandparents, men and women born in the first half of the 20th century. I was one of these grandchildren. Until I was 18 years old, I spent the whole summer break with my grandmother. In this piece, I draw upon my childhood memories and conversations with persons of my age about the days they spent in the countryside when they were children, their relationship to their grandparents and village life in socialist Romania. My aim is to take the readers back in time, to a summer day in the late 1980s that an 11‐year‐old girl spends in her grandmother's company in a southern Romanian village.