SUNDAY

About the Sunday Project

Kardasova Recice, Czech Republic, 2022

Childhood memories can be a powerful thing. They shape us in a way nothing else can. They evoke a sense home and often can be a conceptual place defined as home. 

Within each person being born, a universe is created. Today’s modern times for me are another person’s childhood memory. If our paths cross, I may become a future remembrance for someone who may in turn be a symbol of modern times for me. 

As I arrived, many years ago, in my father in law’s ancestral home, I felt as if I walked back in time. Kardasova Recice is a small town in Czechia. Most of its younger residents had moved away to big cities in search of jobs. The older generation had stayed behind. Some full time, while others come back for the idyllic summers. 

The home has seen a colorful history as a farm, a retail shop located in its living room and as a shelter for needing families. It witnessed two world wars and has been largely untouched since the early 1950s. Much of its furnishings and personal items date back to before World War I. 

When I looked through a stack of old photos, I found a picture of the very bench on which my father in law, Honza, sits today; except there was his father and his father before him finding refuge from the sun.

But now, a new generation began to make its mark on this home. My daughter, Johana. 

While she may be Czech and Polish in bloodline, she is an American. A preschooler, iPad loving, obsessed with unicorns and birthday cake, child of certain privilege that an American big city middle class lifestyle awards. 

As she reached for worn out dolls she found abandoned inside a cabinet and put on a birthday hat left behind by one of her cousins, she began to form a bond, very quickly, with everything that is. It’s almost as if the tradition of the Sunday family visit was being programmed into her mind to become part of her sense of home even though she has never been there before. 

Disguised as a typical country home Sunday, this Sunday became a symbol of reckoning for my wife who identified what was unfolding as seeing herself as a child there on a Sunday. 

If a sense of life and death can be quantified within the consciousness of a human being, remembrances can be immortalized and accidentally relived. As I, who have no childhood connection to Kardasova Recice and this home, was seeing Sunday unfold, I realized that the concepts alive in our minds can be universal and transcend who we are and where we came from.