When Russia began its ongoing invasion of my home country in February 2022, I, like many immigrants from Ukraine, was thrust into grappling with the horrors of a war that despite being more than an ocean-width away, felt painfully close. Overnight, my world pared down to refreshing the news and gluing my eyes to my phone for any sign of phone calls and messages from Ukraine. Watching the country where I grew up get battered and slowly turn into a kaleidoscope of destruction and suffering on my screen, I searched my brain for fading images of my childhood and youth. All I could find was anger, devastation and guilt over my own safety and inability to do more than attend rallies and make donations. 

To find the place that nurtured me and to reclaim the sights and memories of my home country, I longed to walk the land I knew as a child, once again in the flesh. In August 2022, I returned to a small village nestled amidst a forest in the west of Ukraine. 

With fields and forests stretching in every direction, my grandparents’ village always felt boundless.

To my childhood self, it embodied eternity and freedom. Several decades later, it still does.

It is a searing hot August day, three weeks into my visit to Ukraine. My first one since Russia’s initial missiles struck cities across the southern and eastern parts of the country. The last three weeks have been punctuated by the screeching of air-raid sirens. I find it hard to adjust to the sights of bomb shelter signs everywhere and sandbag structures wrapped in a masking net that seem to belong on a movie set.  

Now, I sit in the car with my mother and uncle heading to my grandparents’ village, Volytsya, where they grew up and I only frequented. I haven’t been back here for more than ten years. Everything looks smaller and bigger at the same time. Except the potholes. They’re definitely bigger.

Somehow, the clock in the village is three hours behind Eastern European Standard Time, as if the village of a few hundred people existed in its own time zone. I would rewind my watch with each visit when my parents dropped me off in Volytsya at the end of every school year. This time, as the car zigzags along the ragged road, I’ve set the clock back decades. 

With buses no longer running, the only purpose this shelter seems to serve is confirming the village’s name. The moment I spot it, I feel a childlike excitement bubble up in the pit of my stomach.

A lot has changed since my childhood. Many of the houses in Volytsya are vacant, grieving their past residents and former bustling lives. My grandparents’ house now sits empty and locked too, the orchard behind it and the path to the forest overgrown and impassable. As I stand in front of its familiar red-brick walls, the blue paint on the doors and its window frames cracked and wrinkled, nothing but my own reflection in the glass stares back at me. Yet, I am once again wrapped in my grandmother’s hug, cheered by my grandfather’s wink, enveloped in the smell of freshly mowed grass and home-baked bread right out of the clay oven. It’s still the place where I feel loved and protected.

In the afternoon, my uncle and I go foraging for mushrooms. I do my best to remember what my grandfather taught me about edible fungi and strain my eyes trying to spot taut brown caps peeking through last year’s leaves. 

“Hey kiddo,” my uncle calls to me. “Come look at this one. Isn’t it a beauty?!” I feel ten again as I watch his bag fill up much faster. 

Surrounded by sylvan charm, the war recedes and nothing else exists except for this place straight out of my childhood dreams. The place where I took my first steps. Where trees whispered of unknown lands. Where I roamed the woods with my friends in search of mushrooms and hazelnuts. The place of idle afternoons when I would lie on the grass for hours watching the clouds drift above, waiting for my grandfather to return from his foraging expeditions with small gifts, personal to me: a makeshift bark container filled with wild strawberries or raspberries, depending on the month. Where my grandmother taught me how to milk a cow and make bread. Where I learned to take care of and respect the land. The place that exists outside of time and space. Where every sight, every smell, every sound fills my heart with endless joy and yearning. The place that I always carry with me no matter where I go.

For a brief moment, I feel at peace. A feeling I never thought could be possible in the middle of war.