Sometimes we reluctantly went to family celebrations. It was more fun to leave Moscow and go to the countryside to meet friends. These family gatherings were a foundation, a point of support, a place where the elders passed on their knowledge, tugged at our heartstrings, of course, but shared very important wisdom that we had not yet grown up to understand. And we, young and foolish, let it go in one ear and out the other, stuffing ourselves with Easter cakes, Easter eggs, and thinking that it will always be this way. 

And now I can’t even figure it out when Easter is, because my intellectual resources are depleted – they’re only enough to watch Varlamov YouTube channel, nothing more.

I walk around the neighborhood, everything is so bright and spring-like. “Home” – where is it? Somewhere there. How are they there, at home? I want to be with my mom and dad and grandma and grandpa. I want to snuggle up to them all, breathe in their smells, listen to their stories, touch their hands, hair, faces, look into their eyes and never let go.

And I remember the mornings: Dad would make tea and pour it into cups. Mom would make coffee in a Turkish coffee pot, with foam on top. Even though we have all possible fancy coffee machines, yet, her coffee is the best. Grandma would bake thin pancakes with apples and bananas, and we would sprinkle them with cinnamon. My sister would cook something trendy and delicious. My nephews would eat everything without complaint, wipe their mouths with their hands, and say “thank you.” My own children would eat selectively and hardly even say hello. But they would bombard the elders with questions, hungry for stories, and be astonished by tales from their “past lives”.

Grandpa will come down to tell stories: how he studied at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, how he shook with excitement on the train during a short weekend trip, madly in love, to visit Grandma in Moscow; how he took exams in the morgue, how he spent nights in the library, how he stole books from there and never returned them…

To nuzzle into them all, breathe in their scent, listen to their stories, touch their hands, hair, faces, look into their eyes and never let go. 

Ooooouhh-ooooouhhh.. – that’s the wind howling on our Bear Mountain. It’s not me howling, it’s not me…

—

I wrote this in the summer of 2024 while I was working at Starbucks and every weekend I saw different families all together. I wanted to sob and howl – from love and from envy. Moscow and my family were frozen in time in my memory – just as I’d left them: my grandfather – sharp-witted and full of humor, my grandmother – graceful and light-handed as she made blini using the Romanov family recipe, my mom – ever THE mother, and my father… my father… the one who held us all together, gathering us for family celebrations as he always did. But by autumn, everything shattered. It had been unraveling long before, but I was too far away to notice. Too far to help. And far, far too distant to believe it.

By that time, the only family I had on the island were the kids and Kolya. But I’d also gained a new family – J and everything that came with him. My mom and I didn’t hug often, but after three years, it was something I missed terribly. And then, as I was writing this text on Easter Sunday, working at Starbucks, I got to hug a mom – not mine, but someone else’s. And it turned out to be a perfectly, magically Easter-kind of moment!  And isn’t that just the immigrant’s bittersweet magic? To miss your own people so deeply that a stranger’s arms, for one fleeting moment, become a bridge back to everything you’ve left? 

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