Except from my upcoming book, a personal memoir:

“From the balcony of our small but cozy apartment, I saw the river every day. I saluted it in the morning and whispered good night before going to bed. The river was a quiet friend that mainly spoke in parables. During communism, we learned to unveil truths that were meant to sink to the bottom of river and seas that crisscrossed our country. We learned to look for codes and secrets everywhere, as if solving an infinite rebus whose words long as the weeping willows’ branches took deep root in our consciousness. At times, I wondered if the communists tried to cement the roots of our trees by not allowing us to travel abroad, unless it was to visit former Russia, our communist neighbors. I wondered about the many rivers that snaked around our beautiful country, especially the Danube. It is not only Europe’s longest river—more than twice the length of the Rhine, and nearly three and a half times the length of the Rhone—but it flows through or forms the boundary with eight different countries.”

“So go ahead, be a snowdrop. Raise your head out of the snow, whether you have snow where you live, or not, for we are all amazing snowdrops capable of poking out of snow during all seasons and times of challenge. And when we don’t know who we are anymore, we can simply reach inside our hearts and souls to find snowdrops deeply rooted in our beings. Just as snowdrops are always there at the end of winter pushing out of snow, breaking ceilings, I am sure that we can all have a breakthrough, raising our heads, arms, and beings out of the heaviest blizzard! 

Looking back to the magic of snowdrops, which seemed quite mundane when I grew up in communist Romania in the 80s, now as an adult, I have a deeper appreciation of their beauty and message. The language of flowers…”

“My father loved repairing old watches and pendulums the most. As the master of time, he knew how to control its hours, minutes, and seconds after having studied the hands of thousands of watches and clocks ticking and beating in a language whose inflections and tonalities he could only translate and comprehend. When my father raised his right finger to his lips, I knew it was listening time. My father's head bent to his right shoulder, ears touching the watch mechanism, and the round, black eye loupe covering his eye like a monocle projected into the entrails of life made me feel as if he possessed the big key to the grandiose tick-tock of time.

Yet, with our apartment being around 1,000 square feet, and his working area less than 100 square feet, he found he needed to maximize his space and hang up his customers' pendulums all around our apartment, transforming it into a clock museum. Their chiming punctuated the cool mornings with their dome like ding-dongs, making me soar with elation. In my dreams, I felt I was the master apprentice of time, with my father being the master timekeeper, who controlled the gravity escapement that used a small weight or a weak spring to give an impulse directly to the pendulum.”