Someone brought the good weather. That’s the only way to explain it. It arrived so suddenly, as if someone gathered it in their outstretched arms and dumped it over Virginia — muggy air and all — reminding us what summer will feel like.

I begin every email and every message with Happy Spring! and I just can’t stop.

I didn’t quite understand why until I paused to think about it. This winter has been brutal — long and cold, with snowstorms, ice storms, and record-breaking temperatures. I have never been so plainly depressed by a season: the low daylight, the cold, the endless stretch of it. For weeks I navigated my days between the bed and the chair by the fireplace, completely omitting the dressing room.

I know exactly why.

At a certain stage in life, people start behaving like their parents. It shows up in odd ways — from the sudden inability to pass a shiny object on the road without pocketing it (hi, grandpa and now dad), to handing out unprovoked profundities left and right (hi, not going to tell you who). Perhaps I rewound a bit too far. Somewhere in my mid-forties I seem to have skipped past my parents entirely and landed on my ancestors. Imagining their lives helps me make sense of my relationship with cold weather.

In the harsh winters of the Kazakh steppe, life must have slowed to a crawl. Humans, like other mammals, conserving energy, staying put, waiting it out. And if you spend half the year enduring cold weather, it makes sense that the real beginning of the year would arrive with spring.

My ancestors marked the New Year with the arrival of spring — not in the middle of winter, as we do now. In Kazakhstan the holiday is called Nauryz (or Novruz in other places), and in many traditions the celebrations can stretch for months.

That, too, now makes perfect sense to me.

Today the thermostat hit the 80s here in Virginia. I will be wishing everyone a Happy Spring! until Memorial Day. I simply cannot get enough of it. I am that happy to have survived the winter.

On the porch, in the sun, overlooking the woods, I take a lunch break from a work-from-home day. I smile into the brightness and let it warm me from the roots of my long black hair to the tips of my unkempt, wintered toes. In my hands I am holding a new book — The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat.

This is how I arrived at it.

During a similarly cold winter last year, we impulsively jumped on a plane to the Dominican Republic. In a last-minute attempt to pick an appropriate read for the trip, I had Everything Inside, a short story collection by Edwidge Danticat, delivered just before we left for the airport. I opened the box and held the book in my hands for a moment — smelling the pages, brushing my fingers over its emerald-green cover, so evocative of the tropics and the simple joy of reading by the pool, under swaying palms, legs outstretched on a chaise lounge. Just a few hours away…

The drive from the airport to the resort began the way such drives often do: palm trees, wide roads, bright signs announcing new real estate developments, plastic surgeons, beach clubs. But gradually the landscape changed. Along the dusty roadside, people in resort uniforms were walking — in large groups, on foot, slowly, quietly. They moved through scrub and patches of jungle, along narrow paths and improvised roadside trails, all heading toward the resorts.

It looked grotesque against the destination. Almost post-apocalyptic.

In the shaky cab, my daughter sleeps in my arms, still drowsy from the flight. My son looks out the window in wonder. My husband tracks the route on Google Maps.

Within an hour we are checking in, saying cheers with welcome drinks, pulling on bathing suits, discussing dinner reservations. We grab our books and sun lotion — everything else is already waiting by the pool. The kids are ecstatic in the sudden warmth, tropical plants vining all around us.

Yet the road from the airport is hard to shake off.

“Buenos días, señorita!”

Our lunchtime host soon becomes the one we start seeking out at every meal.

“Do you see my name?” he asks, pointing to the tag on his uniform. “Gua-ri-o-nex! Can you say? Remember! Tomorrow you come back — I test you.”

We laugh.

Guarionex. Guarionex.

I repeat the name and brush the dusty corners of my memory. It sounds familiar, and then I remember — a television series about Christopher Columbus I watched with my parents when I was a child. Guarionex: the name of a Taíno chief who resisted the European arrivals on this island centuries ago.

I feel proud of retrieving the fact from somewhere deep in my mind and imagine announcing it triumphantly the next day.

Not only do I remember your name, I rehearse silently. I also know what it means. My people, too, name their boys after heroes from long ago.

But I never do. It is harder to be that cool in real life.

It wasn’t until we had settled into the rhythm of the resort that I finally opened my book. In the story collection, Edwidge Danticat, one of today’s most prominent voices in immigrant and diaspora literature, writes about Haitian lives shaped by migration, separation, and memory — on the other side of Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Published in 2019, the collection is the last of many highly acclaimed works by the author, who has produced a prolific body of fiction and essays exploring Haitian history, the diaspora experience, and broader themes of injustice, poverty, and everyday human suffering. Until that brief winter getaway to the Dominican Republic, however, I had only encountered Danticat’s name indirectly and had never held one of her books in my hands.

One does not need to be a world history major to understand that a book about the Haitian diaspora carries no promise of a light poolside read. Yet my choice was neither erroneous nor accidental.

Since reading my first book by an author in exile, without fully understanding what it was that tugged at my heart, I found myself returning to similar voices. Writers such as Jorge Amado and Zoé Valdés kept drawing me back. Later, as I settled far from my own motherland, I discovered Aimée Nezhukumatathil, Ocean Vuong, and Jamil Jan Kochai, whose stories of immigration and the “thumbprints” it leaves across generations resonated deeply. Danticat’s narratives felt like a missing piece of my own reading journey. And even though Everything Inside was not the book that would explain the island to me at that time, it was the right place to start.

Now, with The Farming of Bones, the deeper and darker history of Hispaniola begins to unfold more starkly. The novel centers on the 1937 Parsley Massacre, when thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were killed on the orders of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Through the voice of a young Haitian woman named Amabelle, the story reconstructs a fragile border world where language, identity, and even the ability to pronounce a word could determine whether someone lived or died.

Back in Virginia, when I decided to capture how I experienced Danticat’s stories, I couldn’t shake the feeling of unfinishedness. I needed to learn more. How can two strikingly different nations share one island? How do Dominican tourism and Haitian history shape the dynamics between the two countries today? I had come to Hispaniola to do the resort and managed to leave the island largely untouched by any cultural or historical insight, aside from fleeting encounters with service staff carrying indigenous names…

I started searching. I learned about the Haitian Revolution, then about Haiti’s rule over the Dominican Republic, followed by Dominican independence, and finally the Trujillo regime. The Farming of Bones was a natural next read.

The sun is still high, and I have only made it through a couple of pages. It is hard to stay focused — distractions are plenty. There is a new bird in the woods, maybe a passerby on her way back north. Squirrels rustle the old foliage, looking for the acorns they buried before winter. Everything seems ready for life again.

Reluctantly, I close the book and get up. I press it against my chest in anticipation.

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“Hi Mommy, look - I am ready!”

By the time I came back from walking the dogs, my kids had packed their old preschool backpacks, the ones with unicorns and superheroes, and leaned them against the basement door.

“Okay. What’s in there?”

Make-up, notebooks, books, stuffies - lots of stuffies. So many stuffies, I had to send at least a dozen back to their rooms.

The tornado warning in DC area was in effect since the day before, and kids were sent home early from school to avoid the calamity. Everyone was eager to descend into the basement when the wind picked up and the light started flickering.

I went again through their doomsday supplies. My son packed pajamas, socks, and a rather large but cozy throw. My daughter packed a sleeping mask, a notebook, pens and pencils. Both had water bottles and flashlights. She put the puffy backpack on her back, and in her hands held a doll that wasn’t even a toy, but a decoration from her room. It was a realistic, Barbie-type doll with long black braids, dressed in traditional Kazakh clothing. I brought it from Almaty the last time I went home.

“You brought the Kazakh Princess?” I was surprised.

“I didn’t want to leave her there, in case our house gets destroyed.”

Of all the things she could be worried about, I did not expect this to be her choice.

I heard my mom talking in my head and before I could stop it, the words spilled out of my mouth.

“That’s no surprise. Every Kazakh girl has a fairy great-grand-grand-grand-grandma watching over her. This is why you picked this doll with you. You are right, she will keep you safe.”

My husband and I spread the tea lights along the wall in the basement in case the power goes off. My kids and I pile up on the guest bed. It is dark, and the bed is tight for the three of us. Before I could do anything to prevent it, the kids are wide awake, pushing each other and giggling, and I am snapping selfies of our flattened-by-grins, phone-flash faces.

Soon it gets dark and quiet.

I hear their paced breathing. It puts me in the state of acute peace. Acute peace. We are safe here in the darkness of a cave. I am a cave momma with my cave babies.

The night we tried to move our son, three months old then, to his own room, my husband and I realized the ‘cry-it-out’ method was not for us. We brought our baby back to our bedroom, placed him right between us and fell asleep happily, never to entertain the idea of sleep training again.

I’m a cave momma. I am a cave momma. The cave momma cuddles her baby tightly in her arms. The cave momma keeps her baby safe. Why would a cave momma put her baby to the other side of the cave, alone, in the dark? The cave momma keeps her baby safe.

I still could not fall asleep. Something stirred in me that felt like excitement. A distant memory started unfurling, an older memory than even the one that the cave momma had.

“Let’s play a Feasting Day!”
“Yay - a Feasting Day!”
“A Feasting Day - hooray!”

Dimka Z. was the one who came up with the Feasting Day idea, of that we were certain. We is me and Yul’ka, the two of us is all that was left of our childhood posse. Us being the only ones who reached adulthood in our hometown and stayed in touch. Until I left for the US.

And now all of us scatter back to our apartments, and bring whatever food we can find. We bring flashlights too, but also matches and candles.

It might not be easy to grasp, as communities like these don’t exist in the US, but in other parts of the world several housing units built around a shared green space are actually common. So this was ours - three small two-story buildings, in an L-shape closed off on one side by a fence separating us from an abandoned construction site of a Museum of Lenin, and on another - by a row of garages and woodsheds belonging to the members of the ‘dvor’ community. In the middle, there were little gardens with lilac and fruit trees, and a play area on my side of the dvor. Altogether, the space was home to about forty families.

We chose Yulka’s woodshed for our Feasting Day, maybe because she was the oldest and her parents trusted her with the key. All in all, we went in with whatever we had managed to scavenge from our homes.

In the woodshed, her family stored wood. But also bikes, tools and other stuff. In the ground, there was a door that opened to a cellar.

“This is perfect. This is exactly the place for the Feasting Day!”

We descend into a cold and humid cellar. Surrounded by rows and rows of jars of pickled vegetables, we sit on the ground in a circle, secure our lights so as to free up our hands and start unwrapping and presenting the food for a Feast.

Candy, bread and lard, smoked sausages, hardboiled eggs. We ate them in the dark in a solemn silence. We were so quiet during the Feasting Days, that we went through at least a full summer of them before adults found out what we were doing and where.

The day we got busted was the day we did not have flashlights on us and decided to burn candles. When you’re ten or twelve, once you start playing with matches, you naturally start setting things on fire.

“What are you doing there? You’re going to burn the whole neighborhood down—get out of there this instant!”

Andrei’s grandmother was the one to catch us. She was always the one. When we found a dog with a whole litter of puppies and built a house for them in one of the woodsheds, she was the one who called the dog pound. When we found that someone left the entrance to the rooftop unlocked and we all climbed up to sunbathe, enjoying the view of the neighborhood, she told on us to the one mean neighbor who started throwing apples to get us down. I remember running on a sloped roof in panic, slate sliding under my feet. It was always her, the same woman who taunted me for not speaking my native Kazakh.

That was the end of the Feasting Days for us.

I never thought of this until I got much older. Little girls play with dolls to prepare for motherhood. Little boys play war to prepare for what society expected men to do for millennia - protect their homeland. Both little girls and little boys play hiding to practice the skill that kept them alive since time immemorial. But there is more to Feasting Days than that.

When two years later the Soviet Union collapsed, about 400 000 Soviet Jews and their families migrated just during the first year. Dimka’s family among them.

Was it a coincidence he was the one to come up with the idea of the Feasting Day? Was it an innocent child play, a prehistoric game that hunter-gatherers played to practice survival skills? Or did it come from stories told in his family, something older spilling out into our game?

Darkness. Shelter. Safety.

I put my hand into my daughter’s pink backpack adorned with unicorns and rainbows. I get out a notebook and pens. She loves writing. But the thought of her writing in her notebook in the darkness of the basement makes me shiver.

I bought The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank some years ago when putting together my own collection of the popular Everyman’s Library set. But I still haven’t found the heart to read it. Is there ever a good time to read Anne Frank? I am scared of the effect it might have on me. Especially now, in 2026.

There is another strange stir in my heart that the sudden darkness evokes.

Power outages were frequent in my childhood and on the occasions when the whole neighborhood would go dark, there was always a sudden peace in our house. Dad would light candles and all of a sudden start talking in a whisper, as by some ancient instinct.

Those years, after grandma died, dad was becoming unpredictable. Sometimes he had unprovoked anxiety attacks and would lash out at us, shouting, “We’ll have nothing to eat soon! Don’t you understand? We’ll be broke! We’ll starve! Not even a penny for bread!”

At the time, it felt irrational. We were not starving. There was food in the house. There was always bread. But a generations-old fear does not require justification. It is not about probability, but the fact that it already happened once. If something happened once, it can happen again. The memory screams, “we’ll all starve.” The memory protests: “never again.”

It took me years to understand that this fear did not begin with him.

In Kazakhstan, there is a word—Asharshylyk—for the famine of the 1930s, when hunger was not a possibility but a certainty, when entire families disappeared, when having or not having bread was the only thing that mattered.

“The educated world knows little—if anything at all—of the suffering of the nomadic people of Central Asia under the rule of Stalin…” In his memoir, The Silent Steppe, Mukhamet Shayakhmetov begins with that insistence on what is not known.

“...and the policy of collectivization launched in 1929: least of all, of Kazakhs whose immemorial habitat comprised that wide swath of steppe-land from the Eastern shore of the Caspian to the great Tian Shan range of mountains which, with the Altai range to the north, forms the frontier of Kazakh territory, and today’s Kazakhstan.”

I have had this book for years, sitting on the same mental shelf as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank - another book, avoided. I am not sure what it will do to me if I read it. Whether it will clarify something, or undo something. Whether it will give shape to what I have only felt in fragments, or make it harder to keep those fragments contained. Writing this now, I realize that the hesitation is part of the inheritance too- the instinct to look away, to delay, to leave certain histories untouched.

“Blood carries memories, and today’s Kazakhs are, to a man and a woman, the descendants of that remnant who somehow survived the privations of the appalling period this book covers.”

An estimated 1 to 1.5 million Kazakhs died during those years—roughly a quarter to a third of the population, while many others fled, never to return.

But this was not something we grew up knowing.

No one explained it to us in school. No one sat us down and said: this is what happened. Not about Asharshylyk in Kazakhstan, or the Holodomor in Ukraine, or even the Holocaust. These things were not spoken about. If you did not hear it in your own family, you did not know.

We did not know what it meant that Dimka was Jewish. It was just a word. We did not know what histories stood behind it, or why his family would decide to leave.

And yet he was the one who came up with the Feasting Days. Darkness. Shelter. Food gathered and guarded. At the time, it was a game.

It is easy to think that children invent these things on their own. That it is instinct, imagination, play. But sometimes play is not invention. Sometimes it is memory, passed down without words.

And sometimes, it is words - “we’ll starve,” “we’ll perish” - passed down without history, without context. It is up to us to untie the knots, to excavate the meaning, to unpack what we bring to the feast of life - what we share, what we should share, and what we leave untouched.

The wind died down. The lights stayed on.

I gently touch my kids’ tiny shoulders to wake them up and send them back to their rooms.

By morning, everything was as it had been. Breakfast, school, work.

The backpacks stayed by the basement door. The Kazakh princess was back on the shelf.

I make a commitment to read both books, through the discomfort and heartache they may bring.

The freshly dug earth is soft and moist. They make me pick up a handful and toss it into the open grave. What a strange ritual. What exactly is it meant to do?

I send a piece of my soul to the other side with you. I confirm — you are gone, and my hands bear witness to it. Here I am — here. And you are there. Goodbye.

There is a photographer. I remember finding the photos later, in an envelope tucked between the books in our library. Black-and-white, reporter style — shovels throwing soil in, my small sad face, a fistful of dirt extended.

Did I really see those photos? Or is my memory playing tricks on me?

“Eat, eat,” says my grandma’s cousin, offering a deep-fried flatbread in her extended hand. I don’t take it. I look around. A table full of elderly relatives — all still alive, even though older than my grandma.

“Don’t turn your nose up — my hands are washed.”

I don’t want to be here. And I don’t want them to be here, in my home.

But then my own cousins arrive, and I postpone, reschedule my grieving. In my room they have placed two full pillowcases of candy. Our apartment is small, and every available space must be used to store what will be needed for the funeral and the wake. The washing, the funeral, the seven days, the forty days. People will be here endlessly.

But that means my cousins will be here too. I smile.

“Your grandmother just died. And you are running around, playing? What’s wrong with you?”

My neighbor friend’ grandmother was German, but as a prisoner of war she had lived somewhere deep in the countryside and spoke fluent Kazakh. She used to tease me — a city girl — about not knowing my native language at every opportunity. Not meanly. Still, I didn’t like it. Today she goes beyond her usual lines.

I feel shame and let the laughter drop. But deep inside, a small sprout — what will later grow into my present self — quietly whispers:

None of your goddamn business, old witch. It’s called coping. Ever heard of that?

I walk back home.

“Wake up, grandma!” I shake her small shoulder. “Then what happened?”

“What happened?”

“You fell asleep, that’s what happened! Keep reading, grandma!”

I was such a brat.

When I was five and we all lived together, my grandma was the master storyteller of the family. My personal Hans Christian Andersen, my Pushkin — and even more. As my mom once explained, grandma was my Great Mao — the only authority I recognized in my little world.

“And then they lived happily ever after. The end.”

In the ancient Kazakh tradition, a firstborn is given to the grandparents to be raised. Whatever the deeper meaning once was, we — city people — had largely lost it. But for my mom and dad, twenty-one and nineteen respectively, it was practical. Dad was still finishing his degree in physics and mathematics. Mom — that is a different story altogether.

My grandma wasn’t really there to take care of me when I was very little. She was a professor of mathematics too, and a busy one. Even in our short time together, I remember her traveling often to conferences and other obligations. Besides, she was in poor health.

My grandma, Katipa Satybaldina, née Abzharkenova, was born in Georgievka village near Semipalatinsk, in close proximity to the Soviet nuclear testing site. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet government conducted 456 nuclear tests there. By the time I am describing — when she was about fifty-five — she was already wearing a wig to hide her hair loss and suffered frequent attacks that required emergency calls.

Regardless, soon after my sister was born, my nightly sleep permanently relocated to my grandparents’ bedroom, into their double bed, right between them. And this is where my first childhood memories formed.

Three fair maidens, late one night,
Sat and spun by candlelight…

At five, reading and re-reading it at bedtime with my grandma, I knew Pushkin’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan by heart. At seven, following a trend among the “serious” kids at school, I started writing poetry myself.

Autumn, autumn — golden leaves,
Please stay longer, pretty please.

My grandmother was in the hospital for a while. We visited her with homemade sorpa — traditional Kazakh broth — and baursak, the deep-fried balls of sourdough. We waited in the hospital lobby with its winding staircase. She came out wearing her old robe — orange with pink flowers. Soft, weathered cotton fabric. Familiar. And so out of place.

I thought we were taking her home. Instead, we all sat down to share the meal.

Silently, I gave her my notebook.

“What is this?” she asked in her soft, weaker-than-usual voice.

A notebook filled with nature-centered poems in careful Russian cursive. There was also a story — one of her stories — about the mischievous Wind and the impatient Forest.

“This is wonderful,” she said. “May I keep it for a couple of days? I’ll return it next time I see you.” She wanted to show it to her friends at the hospital.

I said yes.

She came out to see us off. We walked slowly. We got on a trolleybus. I went to the back and pressed my face against the large window.

I watched her wave. Her little figure in orange and pink grew smaller, smaller, smaller — until it disappeared, erased by distance.

And time.

The day she died, we got a phone call. My dad picked up and immediately, after the first “Hello?” collapsed inward, shoulders shaking. He sobbed, and it sounded like pretend crying — like during those silly games when the kids are big and strong and the adults can be hurt by made-up blows.

“Mom died,” he said in a small child’s voice.

He was a child, in fact. He was twenty-eighth.

That year, I resurrected my old blue teddy bear and started sleeping with him again. He was missing half his stuffing, and one button eye hung loosely on a thin thread. I also kept my grandma’s leather gloves under my pillow. Sometimes I would put them on and hold my face tenderly, imagining it was her.

I used to see her in my dreams, in random places around town — in crowds, on trolleybuses. She would whisper: Everyone thinks I died, but I am alive. It’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone.

That year I also got an imaginary friend. Their name was…

Actually, it’s a secret.

I kept it for thirty-six years. I’ll keep it a secret still.

When I was five, I had a best friend in the neighborhood who was a little older than me. On the first day of first grade, she came home with a school bag full of brand-new textbooks. She showed them to me with pride as we sat in the grass, our white knee-high socks covered in green and brown. But when I reached for one to take a closer look, my friend told me I was not allowed to touch it because I was too little.

I ran home in tears.

At home, as I remember it, the whole family gathered in the living room to console me. My grandpa stood up and quietly left the room, only to return with a thick, beautifully bound book in his hand.

“Here,” he said, when I wiped my face and came closer. “This is so much better.”

As I type these words, the book—Skazki Narodov Mira, or Folktales From Around the World, published in Alma-Ata in 1985—lies on the couch next to me.

This is my first book. A thick volume with so many magical stories from so many magical places. A book that looks so homely now, having lost the brilliance that made my heart skip that day, forty years ago, when I took it from my grandpa’s hands, my troubles forgotten. It is so old and used that it has separated from the binding in three places, its discolored pages slipping loose in careless hands.

But I have it. I have all the stories. I can return to being five, to the moment when my tears dried because love arrived in the form of a hardcover book with sparse but beautiful illustrations. It was better than the textbook I was not allowed to touch.

How many times did I fall asleep listening to the story of Jack the Giant Slayer—my absolute favorite—or about a girl who married Thunder, or the Cow-Tail Switch? These stories came from all over the world. They did not just open reading to me; they taught me to love characters, events, and narrative styles as diverse as life itself.

I used to read this book to my brother. But not being consistent enough as a teacher—I was in my early teens, after all—I did not succeed in instilling in him the same love for folktales. In fact, he confessed years later that he found them disturbing and was only tolerating them rather than enjoying. Oh, the things we do for love.

Yes, folktales are not for the faint of heart. They were never meant to be children’s entertainment in the modern sense, but rather cautionary and educational in nature. If my childhood in the 80s—analog and poor in other forms of entertainment—provided enough time for books and their interpretation, then my younger brother, who grew up in the era of fast-paced, high-stimulation media, was not prepared for their weight.

Without cultural context or repeated exposure, reading about a woman determined to kill her stepdaughter, who escapes by turning into a gazelle and then a tree only to be burned (Mali); or a red-toothed giant who imprisons princesses (England); or a mother who, exhausted by her children, turns into a cuckoo and flies away (Nenets)—is, at the very least, unsettling.

Still, when my own children reached reading age, I was determined to bring folklore into their reading nooks and create associations as warm and magical as the ones my grandparents created for me.

The search was long. Then I found the A World Full Of… series by Angela McAllister. It was the the closest I could find, and I bought them all. Yet even then, the stories I remembered were missing.

Three years ago, we added a small Christmas tree to our bedroom. Cuddling together with the children in our bed, in the soft light of the tree, a new tradition was born: Family Bedtime. That is when we talk about magical and timeless things, share stories from when Mommy and Daddy were little, daydream about adventures we might take, or simply plan the weekend. Family Bedtime is when we read books that can be enjoyed by all four of us. Family Bedtime is for folktales from around the world.

“Dear family, I have an announcement to make,” I declared solemnly last night, pressing a book to my chest and pausing for reaction.

“I found it,” I continued when none followed. “I found the story from my childhood storybook—in English. The story of the Cow-Tail Switch. It’s here, and I’m going to read it right now.”

It takes a while for us to settle down. My big boy and my little girl shove and squabble like puppies fighting for the best spot. No, you are here! No, I am there! We arrange and rearrange pillows, pull the blanket to the left and then to the right. I clip on a reading light to the small softcover that just arrived, its title matching the story I have searched for for years. I inhale and begin reading.

“Near the edge of the Liberian rainforest, on a hill overlooking the Cavally River, was the village of Kundi…”

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I have never seen my dad reading. Not once in my life. The math books don’t count. Those books, peppered with formulas — more symbols than numbers — barely had any words in them. That’s not what I mean. I mean actual books with stories. Those — never. My dad was a mathematician.

But he brought books home all the time. When we moved to live separately as a family — me and my younger sister, my mom and dad — and furnished our small new apartment in the up-and-coming part of town, with a balcony overlooking the mountains, my father began building our library.

I never thought of it until now — as kids, we often take life events at face value — but I understand he must have had some sort of book subscription. Every month he would bring a tome from this or that series home from the post office. Hard cover or soft cover, twenty volumes long or just five. He kept bringing books and stacking them on his shelves until I was growing up surrounded by them. Like all respectable families in the Soviet Union.

I walk over to my bookcase. I’m in my home in Virginia. My adult home. The home of the family I built overseas, on the other side of the planet, far away from where I was born and raised. I brush my hand over the spines of the books neatly stacked in a line. Fifteen tomes of Alexander Dumas — emerald green with gold lettering. Ten tomes of Dostoyevsky — missing one or two from the series.

“Who in the world is going to read them?” my husband asked when my mom smuggled the dusty hardcovers from my childhood home in Kazakhstan on one of her summer visits.

“Our kids,” I said with a shrug.

“In Russian?”

“Well, I suppose so.”

I am building my home library. That’s what I have always been doing. That’s how I make a home.

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I cross the room to the other bookcase we recently added to accommodate my growing collection. There are new books there — the ones I bring back from my trips home. Still in Russian. Some even in Kazakh. These are what my father buys for me now.

When I visit, I set my suitcase down and look around, measuring what has changed and what hasn’t in the small apartment of my childhood. After a brief hug and a piala of tea, I hear him call from the other room:

“I got you Abai’s Book of Words in a new edition. Did you see? I almost bought The Hungry Steppe by Sarah Cameron, but then realized — you can get it in the US in English.”

I have never seen my dad reading, and I never heard him say I love you. But the books were his way of saying something. And they still are.

I take a step back and look at my new bookcase. I have a full shelf of books from and about Central Asia. This is what I collect now that I am in my forties — to learn and reclaim my heritage.

Will my kids ever read them? Who can tell? Time will show.

I know, I am very brave to post this photo of me from the early 90s. What in the world am I wearing? And no, my natural hair isn’t wavy.

But I had no choice - this is a perfectly descriptive photo of me in my formative years as a reader.

I am about thirteen here, in my aunt’s library, looking like my cousin just caught me reading something I wasn’t supposed to. It is here that I discovered Maupassant, Anaïs Nin, and also a very rare - for the time and the country I was in - illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs.

Today, in my home in the US, my kids have several shelves dedicated to dinosaur books. But during my childhood in Soviet Kazakhstan, books weren’t something we bought on a whim. When a book entered the house, it stayed.

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Every respectable Soviet household had a piano, a crystal cabinet, and a wall of read and cherished books. And whenever my parents dragged me to a party — family, colleagues, people I didn’t really know — the first place I went, after taking off my shoes and politely nodding hello, was the library.

It was at my dad’s friend’s dacha in the mountains where I found The Master and Margarita. I started reading as soon as I spotted the shelves on the second-floor veranda. I took the book down to the river, found a shaded patch among the bushes, and read until I could no longer see the words — the sun nearly gone.

Often I managed to walk away with my discoveries. Hosts either didn’t mind or trusted me to return them. Once, at the home of a famous professor, I stood open-mouthed before a floor-to-ceiling wall of books. He asked me what I read. We talked. That evening he sent me home with a stack of rare books on nature, including a translated illustrated volume on animal behavior. He told me to keep them. His own children, he said, did not read much.

Now my children’s dinosaur books arrive in cardboard boxes — ordered in a few clicks, delivered in two days. No waiting, no searching, no asking around.

My kids don’t have to hunt for books.
I did.

I still do.