It was very difficult for Grandma to part with things. She kept old, wornout shoes and broken appliances. She couldn’t part with such large, expensive items as furniture.

My Grandma told me that it was very difficult to buy anything new in the Soviet Union. According to her stories, people sometimes bought shoes that didn’t fit, simply because the market had “thrown out”, as they said at the time, boots, and the right size had run out by the time the queue came. It was also difficult to buy furniture. Even the word “buy” was rarely ever used by my Grandma, she usually said “get”.

Once, when I offered to make repairs and take all the “old”, as I called it, furniture to the country house, she was very offended. Grandma didn’t see the point of replacing an old table with a new one if it was still strong. She used to say: “It’s still such a strong table.” And all the other furniture was strong too, it could still “serve and serve” — that’s what my Grandma used to say, and I’m sorry that in today’s world, this is often not enough not to replace furniture with new ones.

This cupboard still serves us well for storing groceries and dishes. Sometimes I think that in our kitchen, like in a time machine, the past meets the present, and not just meets it — it mixes with it, penetrates it. For me, all these objects are like proof that the past really existed and not just a dream