Several events came up this month. First and main, the city decided to regulate the area where we will build. Heretofore these were just plough fields at the edge of town, therefore agricultural zone, and no building is permitted there. The building lots available were scarce, they'd put up a dozen a year for sale, while the demand was in hundreds, so the owners of these fields, mostly the descendants who inherited them but didn't work them (like the doctor who sold us the lot), simply sliced them into building lots and sold them so. They were the supply; the demand was us, who wanted to form a home and had no other way. That is, the way would be to wait until we get a society apartment, but from that side we always had the bad luck to be five dinars above the limit, and didn't have the stomach to start inventing papers and witnesses to prove we're poor enough to be below it. So we decided to build where it isn't permitted, just like it was done en masse - we even set the exact position of the foundation to be 11 meters from the front edge of the lot. And it didn't matter that the next foundation up the street was almost 100 m away - later it turned out that everyone held to the same geometry, and the houses are now in a straight line.
So, legalization. In other words, shell out some cash and you'll get the papers, within a deadline. Who doesn't make the deadline, forfeits the lot and it'll be auctioned out. Of course, we started gathering the papers and cash.
First the fine is to be paid. Okay, if we must. It was a negligible amount, though the rest of them were worse. Years later I learned that the misdemeanor judge, who went through the motions and decided on the amount, was none other but Ruška's father. Small town.
Then the participation in utilities - something has to pay for all that asphalt, sidewalk, water mains, sewers, electric poles and transformers, gas pipeline. And it can be paid in three chunks, great.
I started visiting the offices, and it turned out that it can't be paid in three chunks, must do one lump sum, because we're prime building zone. How can it be prime zone when it was agricultural land until yesterday. Well, šećerana. Wait a minute, the lot is not on šećerana, it's out in the fields. But your address is on šećerana. Well that's my parents' house, and I'm not building there, I'm building out there. But that place has no address yet, and this we have.
There's no logic but just fork the cash. We almost had enough, when dad announced that he's buying a vineyard and needs me to chime in with some amount. Great, couldn't have picked a better time.
We were rescued by tanti. She just pulled some cash out of thin air. We never repaid her, and dad never repaid us.
What we paid for was a real contract, where we pay and the city takes the obligation to build this and that... but. Everything was late a bunch of years (water 1991; phone 1992; electricity 1990; asphalt 2011; gas 1997; sewers 2008; sidewalks never). And as it came we paid all of it again. On top of it, there was the so-called air tax - the popular name for what they charged for the built surface in excess of the size of the foundation, i.e. garages, basements, sheds, upper floors, live-in attics.
The vineyard thing - dad was getting ready for retirement. Which he didn't want to do abruptly, but rather in a timely and gradual fashion, to pull out of work step by step, and once he stops working, to have something to do. For starters, he took to filling the gaps in the vineyard itself - he went from 300 to 700 vines in a couple of years (or some such insane number), also added supporting poles, tightened the wires etc. By the time of his retirement (1988 or 89), it was already yielding 200l of loza, and there was an orchard behind, so there was also plum and apricot, even quince at times. The land was by the river, upstream from town, outwards from the second levee, narrow and long (13x200m, but beyond there was some unused and inaccessible land, so everyone extended into it... make it 13x300m). The main road was on this side of the river, so a boat was included in the purchase, and over the years both dad and I acquired the skill to cross the river just so, with a single paddle. Interestingly, the fastest part of the stream is just three meters from the right bank, and the river is about 30m wide there.
The other way was to drive on that other side, which we did many times over the years, specially when carrying a larger load. There were two roads - levee and forest. The levee road was excellent, twice a year, when someone from Naftagas would come with a bulldozer and plane it. Then within a couple of weeks there'd be a bigger rain, then someone would drive a tractor over all that clay, and then it was ciao ragazzi, drive as you know. Which I did, when needed, even with a trailer.
The other road was through the forest. It left town as the big road, which was a flat stripe between the fields, almost ten meters wide, and traditionally maintained in good repair. That was for tractors, carts, combine harvesters. It went in parallel to the river for about a kilometer, then I'd have to turn into the forest, where it zigzagged among the trees, and would often sport good puddles, for the soil there dries far slower. And then the last leg would go through that state land, which was left in bumps and ditches ever since the DTD canal was dug in the sixties - it crossed the river a few hundred meters beyond. That's the rodeo ride, which we avoided. First dozen years we almost never drove through the forest. The one time we did, I managed to find a flatter bit whereby I'd avoid lots of bumps, and got stuck in a marsh. They had to bring some kind of jeep to pull me out.
17-VII-2022 - 6-II-2026