Last autumn the plum harvest in my friend’s family’s garden was especially rich. So I went to visit her in order to help her eat as many plums as I could. This little piece of land in a dacha village, deep in the countryside of Latgalia, had recently been inherited by my friend from her parents. In addition to a small garden and a few fruit trees there’s also a two-floor building which her parents designed and built by hand. They didn’t go through the legal planning procedures so it can’t be seen on any maps or plans, as if it would still exist slightly above the ground, only as a vision in the minds of its creators.
In order to make the plum consumption twice as efficient I took a friend with me. While devouring the plums he remembered a tale that in the 1990s the owner of the land had returned to discover an incredible scene – where there was once his family’s property was now cluttered with incredible new ideas and dreams in the form of different and extraordinary buildings.
These visions, even though they have reached the ground and have acquired physical shapes, keep developing and transforming affected by various circumstances, creating newer and newer layers in the landscape of the countryside, like the lakes in Latvian tales which fly in the sky until they find their right place on the ground.
