[another] remembrance day

November 12th this year marks the eleventy-first birthday of my little grandmother.

[if you don't know what that means, consult your Tolkien]

the splendid word redoubtable describes her quite well. Grandmother survived typhus, cholera, the Russian Revolution, World War 1 and World War 11.

she also survived having us four wild cousins dumped on her for weeks on end during the summer holidays [truth be told only two of us were wild which meant grandmother was kept on her toes protecting the other two - no prizes for guessing to which camp i belonged. sigh].

she was also a woman of decision [a quality she passed on to her youngest daughter].

if you were given notice that the last train out was leaving your homeland in a scant hour's time, what would you take?

Grandmother packed up her children, a change of clothes each, a loaf of bread, a container of lard, the second-best silver [the good stuff she buried in the garden expecting to be back after the war]

and

her treasured sewing machine

imagine, my five-foot-nothing-in-her-socks [i.e. tiny] Grandmother schlepping her sewing machine across Europe to Germany.

waiting in Latvia for the Soviets to return would simply have guaranteed a one-way ticket to Siberia, where they'd already sent Grandfather having plucked him off the street on New Year's Eve 1940

in 1949 [after five years as 'displaced persons'] Grandmother and three of her five children [one had not survived infancy and the oldest was also a 'guest' of the Soviets] made it to Australia

for which i am grateful [even though i don't have a single heat-friendly gene in my body]

oh, and the sewing machine came too.

and is still in use.