writings "green" "Forgiveness" "Memory" On Shoes Christmas Eve Vavarin Mother's Letter-1 Mother's Letter-2 _______ home :: sculpture :: biography :: children's teaching :: email Milena here

green When I was little, my mother had decorated almost our entire apartment in green. She said it was the color of hope, and given the circumstances of her life, no amount of hope would ever have been enough. When the Germans bombed the train she was on heading east, its surviving passengers clung to the ground outside. Low-flying planes fired at each of them, and my mother pressed her face into the earth and began eating dirt out of the madness of it all. Her sister who was there with her related this version of the story to me. The version my mother told to me as a child was that when the fighter planes finally flew away and she found herself alive once more, she found she was looking at a four-leaf clover in the grass.