Trekhprudny Lane

Babcia returned to Poland tonight, and thus our lingering Christmas holidays are officially over, and a new phase begins tomorrow morning. January has become a blur of just a few recurrent pictures: half-light all day above the roofs of blocs; the recorded voice in the subway counting off stations between home and EB's school; nothing but potatoes and fennel in the fridge; slush and the scrape of shovels in the street. We are deep in the claustrophobic and dark passage that is winter, and in a few months this will seem like a tough time. But it does have its own beauty: tea all day, cozy forts built of pillows and blankets, the amaryllis bulb brought from Amsterdam that played dead on the windowsill for two months and just burst into bloom. Russia must be the only place where a woman can wear a trimmed cloche hat and a diamond brooch on each sleeve of her floor-length fur coat and not stand out on the morning commute. And muffs, muffs make me so happy. Moreover, with a visitor, we've been one bed short, so EB has been tucked next to me at night, and three years into motherhood I have discovered the wonderful, shivery-good feeling of sleeping with a little child -- I never did it with my newborns.