III - History Repeats…

Tonight I’m alone with the 8 month old dog. I hear the renters in the basement moving down below. This morning Russia invaded Ukraine from all sides, at least that’s what it looks like when I look at the map CTV posts in their programming. It’s strange. I am familiar with the country’s history, or more accurately my history up until the year my then 8 year old mother leaves the country with a father, an older sister and brother from her first mother, a new baby brother and a pregnant step-mother. They leave the little house my grandfather built for his family. They leave the banks of the Dneiper River. I imagine they leave the goat my grandfather warns his children not to take into the house, and they leave my grandmother’s bones in the ground. The year - 1942.

Tonight bombs drop and Ukrainians plan to sleep in the subway stations for protection.

I am not Ukrainian but where the fighting is presently taking place is where my mother grew up. Our family had to leave because we could not defend ourselves from the Soviet Union, its totalitarian regime where Mennonites were scooped up in the middle of night and transported to work camps in Siberia. No wonder today’s Ukrainians remain to fight against another Russian takeover.