I look longingly at Tara Lovistei. It looks back at me, too, as it lies beneath my feet: undulating, velvety green earth, edged by steep mountain slopes furrowed by ancient roads, slipping out through narrow passages, frozen in seemingly eternal stillness.

As a poet once said, the place of birth imprints like limestone rising liquidy in trees growing on white rocks, or like honey slinking from dust into flowers, lascivious, tender and feminine alike. People in Tara Lovistei – harsh and dreamy at the same time, beaten by bitter winds, whipped by steel rains, illuminated by the green mirrors of fir-trees – are good, simple people who feel truly free only under the horizon of the mountains.

Do my generation and I, who gathered today as sons and daughters of the village, do we still resemble our ancestors? Hard to say, after we uprooted and left the wooded peaks of the stone mountains, for the concrete and asphalt mountains of cities, becoming a sort of mongrels. Some of us are chopping down primeval woods or, worse, have become corrupt politicians.

Tara Lovistei, however, recognizes us all as its sons and daughters and does not distinguish between those who have become doctors, university professors, researchers, officers, builders, masons, or day laborers. Here, at its breast, we are all equal and welcome to a warm polenta with kneaded cheese and a glass of hard tuica from Loviste. I look back again at my old hearth with the feeling that I see it for the first time. I immerse myself in its spells, and get carried away by the endless range of colors and scents that make me so pleasantly dizzy!

But the swarm of moments flies to my thoughts, reminding me that Tara Lovistei will remain in my heart, always and forever, the Paradise lost.