I was in courtyards of half-century-old Soviet apartment blocks. The buildings were not something special but spaces between them were overgrown with old shady trees as high as those five-storey houses themselves, many corners drowned in weeds, it smelled damp earth there and rotting wood and leaves, old stumps were covered with mushrooms. I felt emotionally immersed in that place and decided to take images that would depict its atmosphere.
Poplars, birches, maples, oaks, lindens, ashes, rowans, hawthorns, you can find apple trees in these courtyards either. But I never knew they have wild pear trees there.
When I sat down for taking images of the ground scattered with the fruits, I felt the thick heady scent of hundreds of fallen pears. I just wanted to collect them all at that moment.
I picked a pear from a branch and tried it. Slightly sweet and sour. It was fragrant and almost tasty but you wouldn’t want to swallow it – too astringent. Bite it, chew and spit. These pears can be a good refreshment after having a shot of vodka and, after that thought, I spotted an empty bottle among fallen fruits.
I kept searching things in the courtyards and found lonely cherries, withered black currants, overripe gooseberries, and autumn apples, of course.
We all have a fear of soil contamination with lead and other types of pollution. Nevertheless, I decided to pick up some fruits and black currants' leaves for cooking tea with them because this was just a little bit and, at least, nobody sprayed insecticides onto these fruits unlike ones from stores (Recently, two Russians died after eating a contaminated watermelon).
While I prepared ingredients for tea, my mind was changing. I thought cherries hung too low so every dog and cat touched it and could contaminate them with parasites. So I washed fruits hard and hoped boiling water would kill potential eggs of worms.
I was sipping my fruity herbal tea (with a slight disgust) in front of a laptop when I suddenly got an idea to check “is silicate brick safe?” on google and found someone had posted: “It contains a moderate amount of a radioactive element but this is not a cause for concern”. I stopped reading at that moment and splashed out the tea into the toilet. It was just too much.
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These are my photos, taken with Nikon D750 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G in courtyards between Nalichnaya / Beringa Streets, Vasilyevsky Island, Saint Petersburg, Russia in September 2021. This is not a cross-post, the images were never published on the Internet.
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