SCAN MAGAZINE SPRING 2022
ON SLOVENIAN roots Snapshots of the Dejak family. Written by Stephanie Dejak Illustrated by Eillie Wang
Apple treee “1, 2, 3! Get off my grandpa’s apple tree!” The white leather couch in the living room of our grandparents’ house on Sugarbush Lane was base, always. As long as you were touching the couch, you were safe, and you couldn’t be tagged. The rules were that you couldn’t go upstairs to the guest bedrooms or downstairs to the basement, and you couldn’t hide in Miško’s office, but you could run through the kitchen as long as Stama wasn’t cooking dinner. But if you were on base, and you heard Miško count to three, well … you scattered and you hoped that he didn’t tag you. Apple Tree was our favorite game to play with our grandfather. He was nearly seventy years old, but he was in fantastic shape — he played tennis often and he walked around Gates Mills to the cul-de-sac and back every morning — so you actually had a fair
chance of being tagged by him when he chased you around the house. My youngest brother, David, would observe the chase for a while before deciding to join. He was able to develop his own strategy, which was to camp out on the other end of the couch while Miško chased the others. That way, he could just touch base whenever Miško came close, and he could avoid tiring himself out from over-sprinting. That is, until one afternoon, Miško caught on to his plan. My seventy-year-old grandfather leapt over the couch hurdle-style, almost in slow motion, and tagged David in the midst of a roar of laughter. The rest of us glared at him with wide eyes, shocked, but ultimately impressed. “Again, Miško!” David said when his laughter died down. “Again!”
