“All those who flee and leave the village can never forget it. No matter how far and wide life throws them, they keep returning to the village in their hopes and dreams. Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Šeinius, the poor people of Western Europe, always dream of orchards and gardens, and meadow beetles.” – Jonas Mekas, Letters from Nowhere

I remember it was when I still lived in Vancouver, where I grew up from the age of two, that I first encountered these words that Mekas wrote. My mother shared them on my Facebook feed, perhaps as an attempt to flaunt my ‘Lithuanian-ness’ to Lithuanians in Lithuania, Lithuanians in Canada, but also non-Lithuanian Canadians. It was 2016. I was in eighth grade and had just begun high school.

Now I realise that these words are romanticised. Mekas enjoyed writing of his memories through rose-tinted glasses, often overlooking important details of his past. But at that time, it seems I soaked in these words wholeheartedly. I knew nothing of Goethe, or of Rousseau, but I knew, as well as one could, what it meant to return to my grandparents’ to soak my feet in the garden soil during math class daydreams.

When I was two, my parents and I moved from Lithuania to Canada. My first memories are of my Vancouver home in the Cambie area, and those from my Polish daycare in St. Casimir’s Parish. The area I lived in was not so far from the city centre, yet the Vancouverites referred to it as Cambie Village. Stacked with multi-coloured houses, with their trimmed yards facing serene chestnut-lined streets – it seems as though Cambie belonged to the countryside, not the city.

I recall how at daycare, I was always the last to finish my lunch. My dad used to say that I ought to become a priest for how slow I ate. The teachers reminded me of my grandma and grandpa who, just like them, wouldn’t let me leave the table until I finished my food. At times I missed all of ‘cartoon time’ picking at my meal, and would instead have to go straight to nap time.

However, I owe the sweetest of childhood memories to my summer holidays. I had friends who, during those two months, would take a ferry to one of the Gulf Islands off the West Coast – those wealthier-off families sometimes even had cabins outside Vancouver. Yet my vacation always meant returning to my grandparents’ home in the Lithuanian countryside.

Thirty minutes’ drive south-west of Trakai, amongst land of dense forests and lakes, lies a village called Onuškis. It’s home to no more than six hundred people, and among them my grandfather Kazimieras and my grandmother Irena. Most of my mother’s family, including her grandparents, come from Onuškis and the surrounding villages. Entering Onuškis you are greeted by a white plastered church, and in the town centre an old cobblestone market square where clothing would be sold in the mornings. There, my family and I would shop. Prior to the Second World War, there thrived a large Jewish community in Onuškis, which once made up more than half of the town’s population. In 1941, nearly all of the Jews of Onuškis were taken to Varnikiai Forest near Trakai and killed by the Ypatingasis būrys – Lithuanian, Nazi-collaborator policemen.

I used to spend every summer of my childhood in Onuškis. I had friends who lived there all year round, and friends, like me, who came to spend summer with their grandparents. Yet, as they went back to their schools in Vilnius each September I would depart a little further: back to the West Coast. And every summer, I would ‘return’ – as I described my summer journey to other Lithuanians – to Lithuania.

When I was around ten, I heard parents of my Canadian-Lithuanian friends muttering to one another during those quiet evenings when they thought I couldn’t hear them: “there goes that kid back to Lithuania.” That remark stuck with me. It seemed as though, to these Lithuanians, going back was nothing but a burden, or perhaps a betrayal of their ‘Canadian-ness’. For that, I don’t condemn them – it’s easy to become a ‘Canadian’ if only you can pass as one. But not everyone is so lucky as to receive an ‘invitation’ to this tabula rasa. What does it even mean to be a ‘Canadian’, a settler, living on a land that was unjustly given the name ‘Canada’? Stolen from the Indigenous people that have and still do live here? This is a deeper and heavier question but perhaps one that shouldn’t be avoided by a Lithuanian who settles on colonised land.

So, why do I keep returning to Lithuania? As a kid I never asked myself that. Returning was but a certainty. How could I not? “This is my home, after all,” I would say. My grandparents’ neighbour Kęstas is my neighbour too. The little bedroom with the little twin bed and its window peeking into the terrace is my bedroom too.

Then, I became a teenager. I started manifesting my own goals and moulding my own independent worldview, working so hard (however hopelessly) to establish some differentiation from my parents. You could say it was my way of trying to become an independent, young ‘cavalier’ (I once had someone call me that and I had no clue what it meant). I started coming home later, often without my mother having known where I was. I’d find myself with classmates in other ends of the city, spending late evenings with friends, even secret crushes too. Those warm spring nights, my friends and I would make our way to the beach for our Vancouver-style evening by the dancing fires, illuminating the waterside until the beach security would drive over with their ATVs and we’d stomp them out.

In my final years of high school, I began to develop my own connection not only to Onuškis but also Vilnius, where my father lives. In Vilnius, I found like-minded friends and folks to spend my days with. I started going to their favourite bars and nooks of the city. I bought my five-euro Vilnius University library visitor’s card, imagining I was a student lost in its maze of books. But the village still remained a part of me.

Entering Onuškis, then taking a left on the first intersection, there’s a school. It was there that my grandparents, childhood friends, and other family members studied. Back in the day, on hot summer afternoons, my friend and I would sit on the bench by the school’s basketball court. We’d eat ice cream, play ball, and she would tell me stories of all her memories that took place in that school building. Onuškis school used to be a bustling centre for the town’s youth. When my grandparents were in tenth grade in the mid-1970s, they had over twenty classmates. And in eighth grade, before many students left to go to vocational school, there were two classes of twenty students each. Back then, several hundred pupils attended Onuškis school.

Just a few years ago, Onuškis school still had twelve classes. Yet today, it follows the too familiar story of education in the Lithuanian countryside, whereby every year the student enrollment decreases. In 2022, Onuškio gimnazija (gymnasium school) reduced its official number of classes to ten, and became a regular, non-gymnasium school and today has no more than one hundred pupils from first to eleventh grade. The eleventh-graders, despite studying in Onuškis and being officially registered to the local school, belong to the Aukštadvaris Gymnasium school (Aukštadvaris is a fifteen-minute drive north). However, since there are little more than ten twelfth-graders in Onuškis (and surrounding villages), there is no twelfth grade class in the school. Due to the government’s updated school board regulations, which require a class to have at least twelve pupils, students take a sixteen kilometre bus ride to Rūdiškės school every day – a town on the road towards Vilnius.

With the help of the vice-principal, I met with the tenth graders of Onuškis school. I wanted to hear their stories and listen to their reflections on their identity. It was important for me to hear from the youth of the countryside, who are far less heard than the youth of the city. It was the first school day after their winter break. At half past ten in the morning, I sat down with six tenth-graders in the Lithuanian language classroom under glowing, white fluorescent lights. Hanging over the students’ desks, they reminded me of my school’s own during the cloudy, chilly February mornings in Vancouver.

These six tenth-graders made up the whole grade. When Erika and Milana entered, I was already sitting by a desk with my open notebook in front of me. Milana, an Onuškian girl I’ve known since childhood, sat opposite me. She seemed to be the leader of the class. They sat closest to me, which was maybe expected, as I knew them best. Furthest from me sat Lukas and Nėja, and in the back, Aurimas and Mantas.

Our conversation was slow. It had many pauses. As much as I tried to present myself as their pal, I felt, nonetheless, that I perhaps radiated my own identity; my somewhat unorthodox Lithuanian-ness, my unavoidable city status, a ‘Western-ness’ that separated me as someone ‘different’. It didn’t scare me – I’m used to this feeling amongst Lithuanians. This difference would only scare me if it meant a shadow over our relationship but by the time our discussion ended, and the school bell rang through the halls, we managed to establish a connection.

Nėja lives in a small village near Onuškis and, like many of her classmates, commutes to Onuškis everyday for school. She also attends euphonium lessons, commuting four days a week to take lessons for the brass instrument in Rūdiškės. She hopes to study at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius after finishing school, and wants to return to the countryside after her studies. “It’s nicer here,” she says. “The weather is better.” Aurimas, fiddling with his phone at the back of the class, his chin planted in his backpack, said he is fed up with Onuškis. “There’s no action here.” He feels there’s more of everything in the city. His older brother lives and works in Vilnius, and he also hopes to study there.

Nėja says it’s important for all the urban dwellers not to forget that “we’re all from the village,” no matter how accustomed we may be to city life. It’s important to understand what ‘we’ means in this sentence. In my understanding, ‘we’ means ‘we Lithuanians’. And I believe that is largely true. Whether we are living in the countryside or city today, many Lithuanians come, or have relatives, from the countryside. When my grandparents were attending Onuškis school in the mid-1970s, half of Lithuania’s population lived in the countryside. Even today, Lithuania remains the most rural country in the Baltics, and one of the most rural in all of Europe. More than thirty percent of Lithuania’s population, even those in the city, were born in the countryside.

When hearing Nėja’s thoughts, I began to reflect on my own life. After all, despite growing up in the city, I also come from the village. I think about the thick photo albums gathering dust under the windowsill, where my mother still lives in Vancouver, containing all our memories of the village. Pictures of my great-grandparents’ funerals, my grandparents’ wedding, photos of mine and my mother’s childhoods taken on the same street, between the church and my grandparents’ home, at the Kaunas Street crossing. No matter where I find myself in the world, like that of all of us, my family’s past cannot be changed.

“We’re not behind, as the city always imagines,” continued Milana. These students have travelled all over Lithuania. A week before our interview, Milana and her classmates went to the Vilnius Book Fair and one week before that, to the Presidential Palace to represent her school on February 16th – the day of the restoration of an independent State of Lithuania. “The city thinks we’re just some kind of uneducated villagers,” adds Nėja.

I sat down for a private chat with my old friend Ugnė. She’s my neighbour and childhood friend currently attending Rūdiškės School. I invited her to my grandparents’ for a sit-down in our living room, just like when we were kids (except this time, we had coffee). “Opportunities differ from those in the city… but sometimes, when going to camp or doing a project with your school, you meet a person from Vilnius and see that your education is the same. Life seems quite similar, but you realise you’re much more active in life, even though you grew up in the countryside,” Ugnė said. Having kept in touch on social media, and now in person, it is clear to me that Ugnė remains active in her community. I understand what she is saying. Watching young people growing up in the countryside, it’s always seemed to me that when opportunities are scarce, they tend to make the most of them.

My intention with these conversations was not to interrogate the students, but rather to listen to their stories. After these conversations, I recognised that these young folks are not just a statistic in a disappearing countryside, but a community developing their own independent relationship with their village – whilst consciously aware that it is disappearing, they know what they want and what they don’t want from the countryside.

There’s an important concept in migration historiography, which I study at university, called the ‘push and pull’ factors of migration. This theory asks what factors push people to leave their homes and what factors pull them to a new place. When viewed through the prism of this concept, it seems that village youth not only understand what might push them out of the country and into the city, but they also draw judgements of what might push and pull society out of – or into – the countryside as a whole. For Aurimas, this push from the countryside is its lack of ‘action’, which bores him. Meanwhile, Nėja is attracted to the city for her studies, but still feels a pull back to the countryside, where she hopes to return. For Nėja, the countryside still acts like a second magnet.

Youth of the countryside are an independent-minded demographic, with their own personal understanding of the past and present of the village. Students are just as exposed to the push and pull factors as the older village population and yet we often hear less from the school children.

It’s important that I don’t romanticise Onuškis. In the village, just as in the city, social problems exist. In the village, jobs are few. Really, there are barely any. And so the youth, even those not looking to study at university or vocational school, leave the village.

The town no longer has those usual neighbourhood sites that I frequented as a kid, such as a post office or pharmacy, that once existed in the cultural house that stands across the town’s Aibė. Not to mention the café Samis, that could have remained a lively spot for village youth but hasn’t existed in the town for many years. Despite these losses, the village youth lives on.

As an urban dweller, but still a villager at heart, when speaking to the youth of Onuškis, I feel as though the countryside is an irrevocable part of my identity as a Lithuanian. If the city is the heart of Lithuania, then the village is its lungs. And if the city shaped my heart, then the village remains that part of me and its memories help me breathe.

I say this quite literally. Once in a while, I do this somatic therapy exercise with my therapist. When in Montreal, amidst studies, exams, essays, and when it doesn’t seem that I even have the time to sit down and have a quiet, proper meal. When I feel my body is struggling to cope with all this tension, I practise this method of therapeutic release. She told me I should imagine I’m standing in an open space. It doesn’t matter where this space is, as long as I feel safe and I can feel a gentle breeze blowing against my skin that fills my lungs with fresh, clean air. Without a second thought, instinctively, I always imagine I am standing in the windy fields en route to Lake Onuškis. Those are the same fields I see every summer evening from the second-floor bedroom window of my grandparents’ house. Those familiar landscapes are my lungs. The countryside, whose memories are tinged in the soft scent of greenhouse tomatoes. Those are the memories that allow me to inhale the cool, damp, misty morning air of the familiar meadows and reset.