december 1959.
No other sources but this one negative, one of the few for which I can surely know when it happened, because of the funny cap on my head which says 1960.
The trenerka on me is cut just like any other top at the time, conformant to trousers reaching up almost to the ribs, so it's body part is so much shorter, and the sleeves are longer by at least a hand's breadth. And other garments, visible on other photos then, display the same. Unimaginable nowadays. The transition from belt on the waist to belt on the hip occurred, as far as I can see, in the late sixties.
The pavement in the yard existed only next to the house, and it was laid in brick, as was customary. Brick was not expensive, almost every village had a brick plant. It was never too smooth either, so shoveling snow was quite a chore, specially with the improvised inch thick plank shovel, which is too thick. Its ergonomy is near zero.
I'm faking it on this picture, of course, the area between brick and snow is already mud.
The gate was wooden, just like almost anyone else's. The big replacing of wood with iron would happen in the next ten years, gradually, pretty much everywhere. The iron ones are generally still standing, sixty years later, even though many are quite rusty now, but they work.
Me with granma's rolling pin and the rolling/cutting board. The board had a slot in the underside of the kitchen table, where it would be inserted when not in use.
Kale's house - note the position of the yard door (they also had a wooden gate, somewhere in the back), between the house main and the shed/workshop.
From left to right, Kale's sister, Učubić's older daughter, Kale, M. and me on my flimsy sled.
So Kale had a big metal sled made out of L profiles, with solid wood slats, with a leather thong, the kind they use for whips, to pull it. My folks got me a softwood sled with wood sliders, covered with thin stripe of sheet metal, which got rusty in the spring and then broke in a few places, making the sled nearly immobile. Of course I envied him the sled, just like I later envied him the bike with gears. But at least we got good rides out of his sled. Sometimes his (rather) older sister would pull us. Once, I remember that Učubić's daughters (the older one is on the shot, holding the middle of the thong) pulled me all the way to šećerana and back, it was a nice morning, frosty but sunny. That was probably on their sled. Because mine didn't see much use.
Sometimes, specially a couple of years later, we discovered a huge pit, one of those left by a former brick plant, where they dug out clay. Its sides had a nice slope, specially in the corner where it was only half steep and would take us farther. The other such pit, on the other side of the railway, was bager.
Mentions: bager, David Jamaček (Kale), šećerana, trenerica (trenerka), Učubić, in serbian
28-V-2022 - 6-II-2026