of salt for good luck and prosperity. Salt represented friendship and togetherness in our home. I loved to see what kind of sweet soda water was picked at the store for each party. I would look for the tall trifecta of bottles present at every gathering in Ukraine. Mineral water, usually a form of some medicinal spring somewhere in Georgia (the country in the Caucasus region), promised to cure all our ailments. Then there was a bottle of vodka, store bought, if you had special connections, to make sure it was authentic and not mixed with something that could make you go blind, or deaf, or crazy, or if you were especially unlucky, dead. Often, my grandfather produced vodka in our kitchen on his special apparatus. Homemade vodka was lovingly known among the Soviet folk as samogon , the direct and literal translation, “I made it myself.” He took great pride in his recipe and process. After all, his was the best samogon in the family. My only contact with his chemical creation was on my icy cold feet after sledding in the winter. We would rub it on our toes to warm them up, followed by scratchy wool socks and a big cup of hot tea with raspberry preserves. Lastly, the most coveted item by all the children on the table was the bottle of fruit soda. We could only experience its gassy bubbles and its sticky sweetness at birthday parties. The pear flavor was the standard, but if we were lucky there were also orange or sweet birch flavors. I would count all the crystal glasses set at each place, watching the reflected rainbows dance on the ceiling. My eyes would wander to the top of our bookcase where the birthday cake was displayed. My mom would make the best cake in the world. It was a mystery to me how and when she would find time or energy to make such a delicious birthday surprise. It was a plum cake with buttercream frosting covered with chopped walnuts and shaved dark chocolate. My grandmother made the best Napoleon cake for her parties; it would tower on the table, composed of twelve layers of wispy thin cake and hand-whipped vanilla and hazelnut cream and sprinkled with crumbs representing the snow that devastated Napoleon’s retreating army in 1812. She always baked it late at night, so there were no distractions or mistakes in her special process. It was scrumptious and almost mysterious. We loved our birthday parties. They kept our bellies full and our hearts happy. The presents were never an important aspect of our parties. Perhaps it was due to the sad state of our economy that kept our store shelves empty and our wallets thin. We never opened anything brought
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