Babushka (means grandmother in Russian)

Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Maria Pyaterneva immigrated to New York with her family in 2017. She holds a degree in Journalism and studied Film and Photography in Italy. Maria is passionate about telling stories. In her spare time, she also enjoys practicing – and teaching – yoga.

This story is supposed to be about me coming to America.

I am sorry. I rarely follow the plot or instructions.

I don’t know why this happens to me all the time.

Ask me to cook a Borscht (traditional Eastern European red soup with beetroot), and you will receive pancakes instead.

Is this called stubbornness? I don’t know.

Every time I look at airplanes through airports’ enormous glass windows I think about my grandmother. She was born in 1936. First kid out of nine.

I am so identical to her sometimes. But not by my appearance. No. By something else, which you can’t notice from the outside.

When I look at airplanes I imagine my tiny granny in her two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor.

When my granny and my granddad received this apartment from the factory where he worked, they were sleeping on the floor. They were too poor to buy furniture, but felt very happy to finally have their own place.

Years before that moment, my grandma was teaching Russian language and Russian literature in the village school.

Every week my granddad walked about 16 kilometers through the deep snow of the countryside to see my granny.

I remember finding a large cardboard box with old letters in my grandparents’ closet. Each letter was written so accurately. They were long and very emotional.

“Hi my dear Liubochka, today is Tuesday. I am writing this letter to you while you are probably asleep. I miss you so much. I am sorry I didn’t come to see you yesterday. My work day was so long and it became too dark when I was able to go to see you…”

Each letter was so personal and delicate but I couldn’t stop reading them.

My grandparents met very young. By the time they started working, they lived in different villages.

My grandfather was in love with my granny so he ignored the distance and walked every possible day to visit her.

My grandmother’s name “Liubov” means “Love,” and that is all she gave me.

When you think of the safest place in the world, what do you imagine?

Mine would be an old creaky sofa in a small room in my grandparents’ apartment with a white ironed pillow and a warm blanket. My grandmother reads a children’s book to me and my brother while we hid under a heavy woolen blanket.

When I look at airplanes I remember that my granny never left her country.

She knows everything about our world, about different countries and people who live there, about their food and traditions, about their rituals and animals. She knows everything about the world but only from books. Her world is only hers, the way she imagines it.

The last time we talked to each other in person, we talked about America and people there. I tried to explain everything about my life in New York. My granny looked at the pictures and kept asking questions. Our conversations went on for hours and hours. One cup of tea after another. We sat in the same old tiny apartment on the fourth floor and talked.

Two years after that conversation my granny started forgetting things. It became harder to have a long conversation with her. One day my granny forgot that I live in New York.

The only thing that remains the same after I left my country is the door to the closet in the small room of my granny’s apartment where you will find a large cardboard box with the letters.

Letters where my young grandparents have just begun to plan their life together.

Letters in which two people are trying to find a way to see each other in the cold dark endless Russian winter.

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Moved by Maria’s story? She’s just one of the many voices in our vibrant tapestry of immigrant women storytellers.

Dive deeper into a world of heartfelt narratives, dreams, and journeys at our Melting Pot Sunset event, on November 5.

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A Heartfelt Thank You: Our ‘Immigrant Women Writing Series – Writing the Self’ initiative is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Learning, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by LMCC.