Laura/Mischa

What became of Great/Grandma Mischa is anybody's guess. Most people of her time would've been defined almost exclusively by their occupations or the role they played in family. 

There'd be birthreceipts, taxes collected and so forth. Mischa... We can't even be sure what her last name was. 

Why, how is any of this even a question, then? Because it was Mischa who packed 8-year-old Laura's crazy wooden suitcase for her to send her to America sometime in 1918. 

Laura has virtually no memory of this. Mischa stayed in the old world, like some shadow filling a stone window. Laura says, (in the sense of said) that Mischa did her best in her household-Italian to explain to the man at the train station that she could feel her life coming down around her, that she was ready 'to take a trip on the old razor highway' as it were and that this lonesome child was all she had to give back to the world if this kind stranger in his felt/leather cap would only let the child on the train Mischa was certain the little girl would find some dignified place in the world. 

And Mischa was right. 

They packed her thru one checkpoint, weighstation and layover/terminal area after another, going East from: Somewhere in Northwestern India towards Britain near the Atlantic Sea. 

Laura'd said how she could always remember the snow on the wooden docks, and I think: like some tight/infinity, a moment of near-impossible physics where she must've felt an awe & terror of the dominance of the world before her. 

There'd be little, if anything, in her mind to say in advance of the orphanage where she stayed for many years, typically mute, receiving what instruction the nuns there had provided her. There'd be even less of her 20s, when, with her delicate/flexible English she thought to search out a job as a teacher, finding no real chance of that work for her after she left the orphanage in 1938. If there was a word for 'day laborer' back then, she'd have been called a day laborer. 

She quickly discovered soup-kitchens and the like and took any offer to clean someone's establishment or residence for whatever coins or fair compensation they'd have to offer. And she naturally traveled West & South, West & South, finally pulling weeds, dragging a rake and the like and making quarters where she used to make nickels, and not a day later than July 9th, 1939, she'd traveled as far as Baptist, Kentucky, met a man named Gore Abramowitz, and lived with him until his peaceful demise in 1969. 

She never knew what other guest might join her there. She merely tended the land. 

****