While visiting my daughter in Oregon recently, I walked into the living room and found her and her roommates watching Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries that gripped the world with its harrowing portrayal of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The room was quiet, the air heavy. My younger daughter leaned in and whispered, “It’s pretty popular on social media.”
I stood still, watching their eyes fixed on the screen, and felt a familiar ache.
Because for me, Chernobyl isn’t just a cautionary tale. It’s a place I once called my summer.
I was five when a doctor in Kyiv glanced at my bowed legs. There were no X-rays, no lab tests. None of that was available then. But with one look, he gave his diagnosis: Vitamin D deficiency, most likely rickets. His prescription was simple: “Take her to the beach.”
No prescription. Just nature. So, my grandmother packed us up and took us north to Pripyat, a vacation town just a few hours from Kyiv, known for its fresh air, quiet countryside, and, at the time, its modern pride: the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
We rented a small farmhouse surrounded by chickens, cows, and quiet fields. The windows opened wide to the scent of pine and sun-warmed earth. We spent long days by the Pripyat River, wading in the shallows, catching tiny krevetki, and picking wild berries until our fingers were stained red. We cracked sunflower seeds between our teeth, lay in the grass, and let the sun gently restore what was missing. My legs grew stronger. I didn’t know it then, but I was healing.
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Somewhere, there’s a photo of me in a miniature sailboat on that river, smiling, legs tucked beneath me, completely unaware of what the future would bring.
We left before the disaster. But plenty of our relatives stayed behind.
With the explosion in 1986, the landscape changed. So did our family. Some were evacuated. Others were lost. And suddenly, the name Chernobyl meant something entirely different; danger, exile, fear.
But I still carry the version most people will never know: the Chernobyl with blue skies and berry juice on my hands. The Chernobyl where the river shimmered and the air smelled like sunlight and soil.
Before the sirens. Before the silence. There was life.
Places carry stories deeper than what headlines capture. Chernobyl was not born of tragedy—it was a place of life before it was ever a symbol of disaster. But it’s also my reminder of how fragile and dangerous life can be.
