For eleven months of the year, the village is quiet. Some houses are shuttered, their gardens kept tidy by an elderly neighbor or a paid hand. The school has fewer children than it once did. The bus comes less often than it used to.
Then August arrives, and the license plates change. Cars with Italian, Spanish, German, and British registrations come up the road, and the shuttered houses open. Grandparents cook for three days straight. The churchyard fills for a wedding or a christening timed, deliberately, for the one month everyone can be there. For a few weeks, the village is fully itself again.
Then September comes, and it empties.
The leaving
Romania has been, for decades, a country people leave. There was a wave after 1989, when the borders opened. There was a much larger one after 2007, when European Union membership made it possible to work legally across the continent. By most estimates, several million Romanians now live outside the country — one of the larger diasporas in Europe relative to the population at home.
The reasons are the ordinary ones: wages, opportunity, a future that looked nearer somewhere else. The people who left were often the young and the capable — the nurses, the builders, the engineers, the willing hands. Their leaving reshaped the country quietly, village by village, in ways no single statistic captures.
The staying that doesn't stop
But here is the part the word emigration misses. Most of them did not let go.
They send money home — remittances that, by most accounts, became a significant part of the Romanian economy and an even larger part of individual family lives. They build houses in villages they no longer live in, large and hopeful, waiting. They come back for the holidays, for the harvest, for the funerals. They argue about Romanian politics in Romanian kitchens in Turin and Madrid. Their children speak two languages and belong, a little uneasily, to two places.
It is the condition the book's title names: a country one never quite leaves. You can be fully settled in another country and still wake, on certain mornings, somewhere else.
Why this matters
It is easy to tell the diaspora story as loss — a country drained of its young, its villages hollowed, its talent working someone else's economy. That story is real, and it is not the whole of it.
The other half is a country that turned out to be unusually portable. Romania travels well. It rides in cars across Europe each August, lives in second languages, sends itself home in monthly transfers, and rebuilds itself, for a few crowded weeks a year, in villages that look empty the rest of the time. The map says these people are gone. The road home in August says otherwise.
What you are watching, in those crowded summer weeks, is not nostalgia exactly. It is a country quietly insisting that leaving and belonging are not opposites — that you can do both at once, indefinitely, and pass the habit to your children.
The village will be quiet again by autumn. But the houses stay built, the gardens stay tended, and next August the plates from abroad will come up the road again. Some countries you carry. This is one of them.
This is the thread To Romania, with Love is named for — the people who left but never quite left. Today's note is one of its smaller stories; the book follows the rest of them home.