In search of the lost Costinești

It all started around Christmas. It was a mixture of the smell of fir trees, tinsel twinkles, colored baubles and friendly warmth coming from a stove, for me - a 5-year-old - a terracotta puzzle of seemingly abstract shapes that inspired all sorts of images of dragons and other winged beings. I was playing with little lead soldiers, watching the fickle yellow light on the floor through the cast-iron stove door, left ajar. It's a neural trail hard to erase from my memory, that fragment of time when the whispering song of the fire in the stove mingled with the blizzard outside, resting in the windows with large flakes, like crystallized flowers, that died amorphously, melted by the warmth of the window and then frozen by the frost into tears frozen for a moment. It was a time when there were no Code Reds and lead soldiers were not toxic. It was a time when man was preparing to set foot on the moon, and winters didn't liquefy in the grip of global warming.
I went to the window