Maybe, everything started on the one of the most frosty days in January 1941, when my grandmother Teklya, who could do everything, had to clear nearly a meter high snow and make a deep path which led to the main Stryi road.

On the 8th of January, on the very Christmas I was born in the family of Iryna Dyka (from the village of Dobryany, Stryi region and Jaroslav Bodnar (from the village of Teisary, Zhydachiv region). On Jordan I was christened in the church in my mother's village.

Everything could have been good but a Stryi clerk changed my metrics and it happened so that my birthday was changed for the 21st of January. Thereis nothing terrible in it, but... And alerady being 50 years old I want to rehabilitate my real Christmas birthday.

"Is the host at home or not?"

And there was war, and hunger, and trouble. Being 9 months old I fell very ill and nobody hoped I could remain alive. But I remained, thanks to God.

Than there were terrible days of Stalin terror. Like black shadow this fear pursues me until now because I remember hiding places, basements, cries, shouts and weeping, fires and arests. All this happened many times. But there was also a careless childhood that I spent in my grandmother's garden in the village of Dobryany. When I was a child I was naughty sometimes. And later I studied at school.

I don't know why but I recall my childhood until now. It wasn't easy but it was mine. And since then my Horses and my Imagination have been traveling with me, they went through my conscious life to the interminable space of time.

Now, going along the path of my nearly Autumn landscape I often look back at the garden of my own small planet. Where the bright-light apple-tree blossoms every spring. In the time of my childhood it rose me up to to the sky-height over the ground and so the world was opened befor me.

I shall live and work till the cranes, the emdroideries of my mother, fly in the blue scy, and till the wonderfull apple-tree of my childhood remains in my heart.

Ihor Bodnar