New Home

Tanya came to America recently, less than half a year ago. She, her husband, and her daughter live in a rented house, which is slowly but surely becoming part of the mosaic of their new American life. Her relatives stayed in her house in Eastern Ukraine, and Tanya anxiously follows the political events, reads about news in the region on the internet, and spends her evenings talking over Skype.

Come what may, but life goes on! You need to make yourself comfortable in a new place. With her characteristic energy, Tanya goes about making herself at home: cooking the tastiest Ukrainian dishes, making sure everything is spick and span, and growing vegetable seeds so that in the spring she can move the tomatoes, lettuce, dill, and parsley plants to her window-box, instead of the traditional flowers.

Tanya has yet to furnish the house to her taste. She spends a lot of her time speaking Ukrainian and Russian at home, since Tanya worries that while her daughter is going to an American school, she is forgetting her two native languages. As a result, the house is filled with Russian and Ukrainian children’s books, even Tanya’s old ABC primer made the long trip and now sits on the shelf of her new American home.

Translated by Kevin Doyle