Two images resurface in my memory. One is a paradise lost, the other its polar opposite.

To Kuba Wojnarowski, my partner in childhood explorations

The Glass Place

The way to the Glass Place takes you through a wood. Overhead, shafts of sunlight pierce filigree holes in the dense canopy of branches. Your feet tread on moss, leaves and dry twigs. Decaying tree trunks, lilies-of-the-valley, tree bark, ferns and wild raspberry bushes exude a heady aroma. Naked slugs are crawling along, headed for their unknowable destinations. The crows and the sparrows look somehow different than their town brethren, perching tamely on fences and electricity poles. The large grasshoppers are like creatures from a remote dimension that defy terrestrial gravity and geometry. There are wasps buzzing about, their painful sting a more potent threat than the feeble needle-prick of a mosquito bite. The oddly faint hum of a car passing by on a nearby road briefly joins the creaking, buzzing and chirping noises. A neighbour’s muffled voice floats past, followed by the sound of some kid’s bike horn.

This is the world that myself and my cousin Kuba used to explore almost every day. It must have been the summer of 1984 or 1985. I would have been around seven at the time, spending a large chunk of every summer holiday in my native Podkowa Leśna, a garden town some 24 kilometres south-west of Warsaw. The place now seems like a paradise lost – a golden realm of slow, measured rhythms, very unlike the hurried heartbeat of Warsaw, where things were made of concrete, and everything still seemed alien to my then-seven-year-old self.

Every time I went back to Podkowa Leśna, it was li