den' narodzhennia.

This is my grandmother. She would be 91 today. I think she's in her mid-twenties in this picture... already a long way from the cowshed down by the river.

She loved to dance. She taught me to waltz on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor at her house, she told me of hiking through winter fields in the darkness just to get to the dances, the vechirnytsy, in her youth.

I never knew her when she was this age, of course, but this is how I like to think of her now: free to dance all the time now, waltzing & curtsying so whimsically & elegantly in the perpetual-summer grasses somewhere not far away...

"Mother, may I go out dancing? Yes, my darling daughter... "