Deserted Anna's Valley

The dirt road, soaked in mud and something I think it is maybe toilet water but also the silence, are the key words in my story.

I knew I traveled a little to deep. I have Claudia with me, as always. As fiesty as she sometimes is, she is a shy person. She never said no to a trip that involved walking, hiking or sometimes running away from dogs.

It is not easy for a girl to be a photographer. Especially one that hunts different perspectives than the usual weddings and baptisms. I want to see new places, even if they are close to my home sometimes. There are places hidden still. And Claudia is almost always with me. I hope someday she'll become less intimidated by my camera and Steemit.

There are maybe 10 people still living in this village and some animals. Because of the landslides but also because of the hard living between these two, in the middle of nothing-hills, people left the area. Houses still there, souless, somehow waiting the moment their owners will come back.

You can recognize the houses and guess their former owners in this small and lonely village of Anna's Valley. As always I find stories in these abandoned walls and as always I tend to draw feelings from them.

The house of Grigore's parents, the only alive person we two met while roaming on those hills, is standing in the middle of the orchard he used to play in his childhood. Now he has his own house, just across the narrow main road. The old men passed away few years ago and Grigore didn't had the power to bring down this old house. As he said "There's enough empty land around these parts, anyway.".

The house of the former teacher that used to live a few tens of years before in the village is almost untouched. The only things that betray the lack of constant people traffic around is the fact that the grass in front of the houses is standing. Human stepping never conserves grass.

There is little sense of property in this village. Maybe because is mostly abbandoned or maybe because this community never saw the real need for fences to be everywhere. Walking among the small houses you can find corridors and empty spaces of grass. Spatiality is different here as you don't get to sense the classical "neighbour feeling" gives you in our normal cities.

Here and there, the most happy inhabitants of the deserted village come accross your path. Sometimes noisy and fearful, clumsy but aggresive, the lifestyle of the animals in Anna's Valley is the best. In the middle of nature, with little to no human presence, they are happy and prosperous.

There is no notion of time and living here is like puling the plug from normal life. The church of Anna's Valley is a little bit lower down the road but the former patriarchal house, the old one, is placed here. The basement is probably where the good wine of the priest was kept.

The house of the former secretary from the communal gathering is still in one piece, Grigore mentions while we move a little further up the road. Dislike many of the other houses I photographed around, this one hasn't been visited for a long time. The secretarry died around '95 but her children never looked to make anything here.