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| © Marta Podniece 'Autumn in Riga' |
She starts her day always the same way: by sweeping yellow leaves into bigger and smaller piles, swearing on guys that throw cigarette butts on the ground instead of throwing them in the bin and she's always there - welcoming random people on their way to work, being a psychotherapist while listening to the petulant stories of grannies of how much the old bones hurt and that the medicine has become way too expensive, greeting the postman who's trying to enter the blockhouse but apparently forgotten the entry code as he stays at the front too long, probably thinking. This everyday ritual hasn't changed at all, at least for the last 20 years. It might be very possible that the prisoners inhabiting the cells of this Blockhouse Paradise have changed, the kids of them have already grown up, but she's still there - sweeping the streets and washing the stairways of the blockhouse with chlorine (so the smell is worse than in a public swimming pool). So invisible and at the same time regular she is. She's like a thing that belongs to this particular Blockhouse Paradise, even more than the actual prisoners of the inhabited cells. She's like a clock of existence. She's like a painting on a wall in a famous museum (which is admired through the centuries, yet nobody cares to bother, as long as it is there and nobody has taken it away). She is an icon of this live Museum of Cells, where behind the closed doors people tend to quarrel, love, cook dinners and oversleep working hours. It seems to be a way of being a part of a randomly formed social group, though unintentionally.
Her bluish purple smock does not change colors either (color of royalty, wealth and wisdom) as the years pass by and it is an integral part of this urban museum icon, of her being. And her face is a face of an angel in a Forgotten World filled with degenerates, drug addicts, young families and old couples, homeless cats and sometimes dogs, living inside or nearby this particular Blockhouse Paradise, living in a space that has no signs of high culture, with not a single building that would evoke high appreciation or amazement, not a single positive vibe around... maybe that's why these districts are called the 'sleeping' residential complexes... and there are many of them, having many of these urban fairies in bluish purple smocks sweeping around the magic dust.
