Heritage
I imagine where my grandparents came from in Lithuania - a small tract of green country that was directly between two raging empires - Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia - both powers only growing in control and dripping in blood as World War II decimated all parts of Europe, as well as large swaths of Asia and Northern Africa. At different points of time after the Allies declared victory, each of my grandparents, now in their older adolescent years, fled from the Baltic region. In that short span, the Iron Curtain cemented across Eastern Europe, blocking access for many long, chilly decades.
Birute and Antanas found each other in that Lithuanian social club in Halifax, England. I can only, again, use my imagination to picture what they had to do to survive those years - until they began to dance together on one particularly fateful evening.
Neat rows of grain and lowing herds of animals in the fields. Clouds passing like great ships of shade over the gentle hills of land. And at night, the skies dripping heavy with stars, as each dined with their families on their respective childhood farms, not all that far from one another, even then. All I have is what they deigned to tell me over the years. Because, I can tell you, it no longer looks anything like what they described on so many occasions. It may be quite a while before I can safely take my young son. The strong desire lives in me to show him what remains.