When I was six years old, my father, my mother and I left for three years to Algeria. My fifteen years old sister had to stay in Soviet Union because of many official and not so official reasons. She stayed at a boarding school near Moscow. We saw her once a year during summer vacation. We flew to Moscow, took her with us to Moldova to spend our summer break at home. And at the end of the summer vacation we flew or travelled by train to Moscow, said our good-byes to my sister and left for Annaba again. Annaba is a beautiful city on the eastern part of the Algerian coast to Mediterranean Sea.

This being apart from each other was heart-breaking for all of us and for my sister especially, because she was alone at the boarding school without us three. And although everyone was very kind to her there, she was very homesick and she cried almost every day during the first half of the school year. There are blanks in her grades during this time.

But I never saw this sadness in her letters to me. She was sending one letter to all of us and one separate for me within the same envelope. She was often drawing small pencil-drawn cartoons and enclosed small pocket calendars which changed images when you moved them. At some point I had a large collection of them.

Although some of the dearest memories I have are connected to Algeria, I hated being there as a child. The number of children in every family scared me and I asked my mother whether there was a kindergarten in every house and every flat. Almost everything was so strange and so foreign to me. Especially at the beginning, I didn’t have many friends apart from school, which was far away from where we lived initially. And Svetlana’s frequent letters were very special sweet sparkles of light in the daily routine that I didn’t quite enjoy.

The special highlight was Svetlana’s greeting on a radio show for us. In Moscow they had a special radio show for those who were far away from home: for soldiers, for diplomats and families like ours being on temporary stay and service in a foreign country. Svetlana has let us know about this show in advance. My father borrowed a radio receiver from a colleague that was able to tune the long waves and catch the sound of that Moscow radio station, the exact name of which I don’t remember today. We all gathered before the radio in good time before the show and waited until it started. We didn’t move and exhaled happily when we heard the moderator say: “Svetlana greets her mother, father and sister who are staying currently in Algeria and wished a song from Sofia Rotaru to be played as a musical gift for them”. I don’t remember the exact words. My mother and my sister will probably recall them much better, but I remember the feeling of warmness and closeness to my sister in that moment. I still have the picture of that small black radio receiver in my mind, standing on a small stool and watched and listened to intently by my father, my mother and me.

And although my sister and I hear from each other more often nowadays and today we live in the same country again, I still have this warm feeling spreading within me whenever I hear from her.

Almost every girl in Moldova wears earrings. And when I hoped to get mine at the age of six at the end of seventies, many girls I knew had some already. My parents promised me the holes and earrings for in summer of 1979. It was the summer when my parents and I were getting ready for our three-year stay in Algeria. My parents were in the process of keeping their promise with the earrings. My mother bought me very cute gold-plated earrings in form of small wired flowers with purple glass crystals at the center. The only problem was is that my parents were up to their ears with multiple preparations for our stay in Algeria and the day of our departure was coming closer with great pace. So, the probability for me to remain without earrings in that summer was quite high. And it was not clear whether I could get my ears pierced in Algeria.

It was my sister who made this wish of mine to come true. She was only fifteen at that time and definitely had many other things on her mind besides my earrings. One of them was her very understandable worry to remain alone in Soviet Union without us at a boarding school. But as she often did and does today, she put the interest of her loved ones, in this case me, before hers.

One hot day during that summer, she told me to follow her to one of her friends’ home. On the way there she told me about her plan for me to get holes and earrings. Her friend’s mother was a nurse and agreed to pierce holes in my ears after her daughter asked her about that. This is one of the best memories of my childhood. Maybe because this whole action was kept secret from our parents, maybe because of the kindness of the woman who punched the holes, but definitely also because of the grated carrot with sugar she gave me to eat after each hole and each earring being in place. That was a great trick. The first hole done with a simple sewing needle after one of my ears was disinfected and pierced. The first piercing did hurt. But there were three reasons for me to agree the second hole to be done as well: I wanted to appear tough and grown-up in front of my teenage sister and her friends. Second, it was ridiculous and unthinkable to walk only with one earring in late seventies in Moldova. And the biggest reason that weights the most in my memories of that day is: I desperately wanted to finish that bowl with the grated carrot with sugar.

On the way back home my sister suggested not to tell our parents about my ears and let them discover the earrings in my ears. But I recall that I couldn’t wait too long for them to find out and revealed what happened. Usually I did it when I wanted to complain against my sister. But this time I was glowing and eager to tell our parents how great she is.

My sister’s friend’s mother liked that fact that I didn’t cry and praised me for that and she wanted to make the whole procedure faster for me. So, my second hole was made at a slight angle and I have to remember this when I put an earring into my left earlobe otherwise it pricks. But I really like this, because this makes the hole in my earlobe unique, and which always reminds me of this wonderful adventure, when my sister took care of one of my biggest childhood dreams to come true.

My sister Svetlana, also known as Sveta, has saved my life many times. She saved it from boredom, from depression and distress, and at least a few times literally saved my life by making consciously or unconsciously sure, that nothing bad or dangerous happened to me.

I don’t know when it was the first time that Svetlana saved my life, but one of the first major ones was during the earthquake on the 4th of March in 1977. It was a very strong one, 7.2 points on Richter scale with an epicenter in Vrancea, and in Romania more than 1500 people were killed.

In Chisinau, where we lived at the time, it was also very strong and many buildings were destroyed. Chaos and panic broke out and my parents, being at a party with friends on that evening, could not get back home so quickly from another part of the city. My sister and I were alone at home. I was four years old and Svetlana was twelve.

I was already sleeping and didn’t wake up during the earthquake. As soon as the earth stopped shaking, my sister grabbed a blanket, wrapped me into it and ran downstairs and out of our block of flats.  Carrying me in her arms, she made it sooner outside than many of the adults from our house. Our block of flats did survive this and many subsequent earthquakes and still stands, but if something would have happened to it, I was safe in the arms of my sister.

Starting with youngest age, my sister was always and is a person of action and she puts those she loves into focus of her attention and she cares of them no matter how “annoying” they might me. I am talking of myself here, because when I was small I was almost constantly complaining about almost anything, especially about my sister. “But Sveta said this! And Sveta said that!” My parents had hard time calming me down and explaining to me that my sister is older and knew better what she was doing. I was protesting to these arguments by climbing onto a kitchen stool and exclaiming: “But I am higher!” Please note how I said it: not taller, higher! This is now a family joke about me being “higher”, which is true today also without a stool.

Of course, there was also a considerable gap in our ages that made a four year old sister for an almost teen naturally annoying. This gap melted over the years and we are best friends now, although I still do my best to annoy her time to time. 😉

Later in this blog, I will share more of wonderful adventures and moments I had and continue having with my sister. She has no choice. 😉

I was heading to visit my mom on a quiet and unusually warm November evening when I first heard and then saw a large V-shaped group of cranes heading towards south. My husband and I were wishing and working on becoming a family of three for the previous six years. I was in the middle of fertility treatment during this time, so I made a wish to become pregnant and to have a baby by the following November.

The whole treatment meant a great physical and emotional rollercoaster for me. Apart from that, it didn’t work and when I heard the next group of cranes in the warm December that year heading towards warmer lands, I started blaming them for not making my wish come true.

There was a possibility to do the whole fertility procedure again and again, but the six years of constant coordination of our intimate life and our life in general towards the wish of our own child has worn me down.

On the day the eggs were taken and on the day of the insemination we could see the other couples in the waiting and recovery rooms doing the same thing, following their dream to have a child. And I was extremely shocked to see a couple who did the treatment several times and who were doing the current one like robots. They were so estranged from each other and appeared so depressed, that I suddenly knew that I didn’t want this to happen to us. I was already feeling reluctance in all that “you must do this and that, otherwise you will not get what you wish” in respect to having a child. I loved my husband and I didn’t want the baby wish to bring us apart. And I somehow felt that we had to stop.

Wishing me and us only the best, my husband supported me in my wish to stop trying in getting me pregnant with medical help. We didn’t exclude to change our minds later, but we decided not to follow the “fertilization path” at least for a while. We decided to take another way to become a family. We decided to apply for adoption.

Adoption is a special topic in my family. My father was an orphan of the World War II and spent all his conscious childhood in orphanages and boarding schools. Shortly after the war, there was a wave of adoptions and along with other children, my father was desperate to be adopted and become a member of a real family. He borrowed newer clothes from other kids to look better and smarter, but he was too skinny and too small and many potential parents were afraid to adopt a weak child during those hard times.

Long after his death, my mother, my sister, my niece and I used to visit orphanages and bring sweets to children there on the anniversaries of my father’s birthday and death.

So, adoption for us was meant not only to give us a family but to bring a child and us, both needing it badly, together and give us all a gift of a family. My husband and I craved for two things: to see and to witness a child growing and to give to him or her all the knowledge and love and humanity that were given to us by our families, friends and role models.

Before going for adoption, we went for a two-week vacation on La Palma, a Canary Island, where six years earlier we spent our honeymoon. We had an absolutely great and recharging time. And we were to find out later how good this time and place was for and to us.

We came back home, and just before getting the latest versions of the forms for applying for adoption I felt strangely sick. Strangely because I had suddenly aversion against my favorite drink and one of my favorite meals of all time: coffee and chicken. So without actually believing in a positive outcome I made a pregnancy test. I came with a shocked expression on my face out of our bathroom. My husband, Michael, who bought the test for me, has misinterpreted it as disappointment, which happened many times before, and said with sympathy and warmth in his eyes: “It’s negative, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s positive”, I whispered incredulously. I threw the test away, but ran to the bin several times to check whether it was really positive. I even took a picture of it and asked Michael whether he has also seen it as being positive. I think Michael was the first of us two to realize that this was really happening. Even though I called our families and reported the good news, I was still somehow afraid that this was just a dream.

Nine months later, in November, sitting in our living room and rocking my few-weeks old son into sleep I heard the cranes again. In that moment, I remembered how a year before I have been angry with them and sworn not to make wishes anymore, should I hear them again. Of course, none of this was serious and I can prove neither the working nor the nonsense of such wishes and beliefs. But I still felt somehow guilty, because my wish to have my baby until November in that year did come true exactly as I have wished it. I apologized to all crane groups I happened to see or hear that year. I thanked them from all my heart for making my biggest wish come true.

An afterward by the author:

This story triggered me researching a bit about cranes, and it looks like that they are indeed migrating from Russia, Finland and other Scandinavian countries to warmer places in November and sometimes even stay longer or over winter in some regions. I found the following page very interesting: http://www.thegreatcraneproject.org.uk/