Posts about both sides of my family
My father was a hoarder. His house was not as bad as those you see on television, with stacks of newspapers lining the walls and furniture balancing on top of each other in the corners, but he certainly kept stuff. So much so that, when he died, I threw out
I have decided to write my memories of my youth, my life and now my “senior” years so that you will know your mother better. So begins the memoir my mother started but never finished. It is handwritten on just three pages of a notebook which was once thick. I
Once again I have found something interesting in my quest to sort through the paperwork and documents I inherited from my parents. The picture above shows the front and back of a small card, around the size of a business card, I found tucked away in some of my father’s
Is writing in the blood? Are writers born and not made? Can the desire, if not the talent, for writing be inherited? I write, my parents wrote – my mother authored a couple of non-fiction books – and my maternal grandmother was a published author of a memoir, Upheaval. I
Despite the common assumption that only children are spoilt, I cannot remember that being the case. I was definitely lucky though. As the only child of a Baltic German father and a Russian mother, I celebrated both birthday and name day, Christmas on 25th December and Orthodox Christmas on 7th
I am lucky that despite war, revolution and immigration, old photographs from my maternal family have survived. I do not know how some of these photos made it through the Russian Revolution. I do not know who grabbed them and threw them in their luggage as they were fleeing Russia.