My great-grandmother was thin and straight as a pole! Her dresses, plain and always dark, were immaculate and perfectly pressed. How she managed this, when her days were spent cooking, cleaning, and working in the small garden, remains a mystery. Her hair was a wonder to me. She wore it up, wrapped in braids around the top of her head, like a crown. I never saw it down, so I have no idea how long it was, but it had to have reached her waist for her to be able to braid it and make such a crown of it. I was very, very envious of that crown! My hair was always cut short, and I dreamed of letting it grow and one day having a braid crown of my own.

Occasionally, my great-grandmother would take me out into the garden to “help” her. We dug potatoes out of the dirt to be fried for dinner! We picked red and black currants off the bushes to be made into preserves! We took fresh raspberries off their branches, and I stuffed myself full of the sweet, plump fruit! It seemed to me that the tiny plot of land owned by these two old people offered more goodness than any grocery store in Leningrad. I was probably not wrong.

My great-grandfather preferred to spend his time indoors, except for the few minutes it would take him to bring in a chicken for dinner. One day, I tagged along to the chicken coop with him. Big mistake! I watched in mute horror, as he grabbed a hen, placed its head and neck on a stump, and chopped it off with one sure, swift swing of the axe I hadn’t even known he was carrying. The chicken actually ran a few steps without its head, making the expression “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” a visual one for me for years to come.

When my great-grandfather spent time with me, it was usually occupied having “surious” conversations (the Russian word for serious is very similar to the English one, but he always changed the the e sound to oo), showing me treasures and telling me fairy tales. The stories I already knew — The Firebird, The Snow Queen, The Twelve Brothers — it was the treasures that captured my heart. There were three rings, simple golden bands, each with a large colored stone set in the center. One was green, one red, and one blue. Great-grandfather insisted they were real emerald, ruby, and sapphire and promised that someday they would be mine. The chances of those rings being real gold with real gemstones were exactly zero! Had they been real, they would have been sold years before. But that never occurred to me.

I lived my childhood with the certainty that the treasure would someday be mine. My great-grandparents died about a year before my family emigrated. A couple of items from their house were left to my mom — a cut velvet table cloth, a scratchy wool blanket, and a vase or two — but those rings were forever gone.