Oh to be here.
The old house in Belarus and a treat just having arrived. Invasions and wars that just keep coming along like the units that march in the May Day parade in Moscow. One done and thinking you can go but another something that ties up all the trains only a hop, skip, and jump behind.
But all worth it. Grandmother’s house where Mother was a little girl before the big war that reshuffled everything. Trains to take to whatever big city struck Grandfather’s fancy and summer vacations on beaches everywhere in Europe that they had sand. Finland, France, and Dubrovnik, wherever anyone wanted to go. Coins flipped every spring. Maps pulled out with passports stuck full of stamps by the time anyone was big enough to go to school.
Different after that and Vienna near impossible let alone Paris. But all right. Someone new for a tsar and the old tsar gone.
All right but a smaller place and the house nearly cut off what with everyone being someplace else.
An hour looking through the old chest in the hidden place behind the night nursery closet and another in the hiding place in the attic. Funny. People having run through like a river and that over and over again, but the old things not found. Must not have been looking for them.
But a treat at the bottom of the second chest. Mother when she was little that winter in Odessa. A coat with swansdown and a big bow on her head from what must have been the finest children’s dressmaker.
Happy and bundled up with love. . . Life and a husband that goes from place to place and never sticks. . . a home that stays in place but not for much longer . . but a mother to love you and that’s all you ever need.
Yet another enchanting tale of grace and civility from time past. Memories all we have left now. But, oh, the sacred treasures that were left behind in all the secret chambers, closets and chests in grandmama’s old home. That long ago place where mother grew up. Sweet, sweet memories and tender mercies of the heart captured forever in the click of a flashbulb. Camera preserving yesterday’s beauty for the future’s surprise. Mother smiling up at me from her privileged childhood. A look and a love to cherish from this day forth.
Thank you~ All that and such a wonderful image you found . . . a cherished little girl she must have been even if we don’t know her name.