What I Did in Moscow…

Sometimes I still smell Russia when I wake up. It’s the parquet floors ubiquitous in old apartments, the wooden boards with interlocking tongue and groove creating repeating V-shapes lining narrow hallways; it’s the perpetually boiling teakettle waiting in the miniature kitchen; it’s the smoke hanging in the cold air. As I wake up I imagine myself in the apartment of my Moscow host mother, lying in my little bed while snow falls past the window, accumulating on the sill, then blanketing the still-quiet and dark street below, covering the leaves of the trees that line the park across the street from our seventh-story apartment, and silently accumulating on the black woolen shoulders of the overcoat worn by the lone early-morning walker in the park.