Babushka

I first met Nellie about six years ago when a friend who worked at her nursing home introduced us. Having spent a couple of years in Moscow, I knew enough Russian to muddle through a conversation, and Nellie had lost what little English she used to know when a stroke paralyzed her right side ten years earlier. Now this eighty-something-year-old little lady only knew the Russian language of her youth, and made life quite...shall we say, interesting...for the nursing home staff who did their best to comply with her incomprehensible demands. Nellie, as I learned, is lovable and generous and cranky and irascible and opinionated and quirky, all rolled into one wheelchair-bound bundle.

So I began visiting her, most Tuesday afternoons, with my electric kettle and tea paraphernalia, for I knew from my years in Moscow that Russians love a good chat over a cup of hot tea. Nellie decided that, though I didn't speak very well, I was a pretty good little girl and would do nicely as a granddaughter--vnuchka. And that is how I find myself, years later, with a Russian babushka (grandmother) who calls me periodically to ask me to bring a bar of soap or "that thread, you know, for that shirt." Or to warn me about cutting my finger on a broken mirror which might or might not be in my purse...but that's another story.