January snowbanks encountered on the short walk between my downtown highrise and office building made me more nostalgic than vexed. Mounds of snow took me all the way back to Grazina Matuliene in faraway Baltic States.
It's winter 1999 and the last time I saw so much snow was March, 1991 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Deceptively peaceful in a backdrop of snow, Vilnius was then a city under heavy Soviet siege.
On Jan. 13 of that year, 15 Lithuanians had been shot and killed and another 500 were injured by Red Army soldiers during the storming of the Vilnius television tower.
The defiant mood of the hunger strikers was reflected all over the city. Meters of barbed wire, deeply dug trenches and mammoth concrete blocks were set up in front of the parliament buildings, where civilians continued to keep a vigil honouring their martyrs.
Photographs of the dead, including that of a female student mowed down by a Russian tank, were flanked by perpetually burning candles, thousands of rosary beads and mounds of spring flowers.
Literally tens of thousands of placards and posters joined the drawings of schoolchildren at the site, with signs declaring, "The truth cannot be shot" and "Soviets go home" dominating the scene.
Every day, hundreds of young men made a kind of ritual in coming to the parliament buildings where they nailed down their conscription papers on a specially erected post.
Flickering firelight picked up the gaunt faces of hunger stikers huddled around flaming oil drums. And the snow was everywhere.
But it was Grazina who taught me the most about hardship and snow-bound winters. Hobbling through city streets on high-heeled boots patched with thick cardboard, she would come to my hotel to take me sightseeing.
She had charmed one and all when she turned up, full of hope, at one of the lectures sponsored by the Toronto-based Committee for a Peaceful Transition to Democracy, which had made its first stop at Vilnius.
A candidate of psychological sciences at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Economics when she was at work, Grazina was wife and mother during her days off from her university job.
Like other wives and mothers, she had to queue up for the staples that made up the evening meal. In a spring where bitter driving winds dumped more snow on the streets, the psychologist, clutching the collar of her thin coat spent hours and even days in the lineups--sometimes only to find out that the food had run out just as she made it to the front of the queue.
In 1991, average citizens of Russia's Baltic states, were earning about 200 rubles a month. They were paying 11 rubles for one kilo of beef and nine rubles for a kilo of pork - when available.
Still to Grazina, a resident of Vilnius, a city under heavy Soviet siege, "today was a good day; there were no shootings."
Grazina complained about nothing, and it was one of my work colleagues who told me she had to walk two miles from her home to make it to the hotel where we were staying. She always carried fresh cardboard with which to reinforce her leaking boots, their high heels seeming incongruously fashionable for the harsh elements. They were the only ones available when she purchased them at a second-hand shop.
Without Grazina and her nightly trek to the hotel, I would never have seen Lithuania's exquisitely beautiful churches. She was an angel of the snow.
Waiting for buses, which seemed to take ages to arrive, Grazina talked about the better days just around the corner for all Lithuanians. Insisting always on taking me back to the hotel before making the long trip home alone, she came into the lobby only to replace the cardboard in her boots.
These were times of changes for Lithuania and the rest of the Baltic States. One of the new-fangled shops that came in on the first wave of the new entrepreneurial spirit was a brightly-lit drugstore, its windows gaily festooned with brightly coloured crepe paper. Grazina took me to this shop and told me she sometimes went there evenings to dream wistfully, a la Holly Golightly in front of Tiffanys. In the centre of the drugstore window was a bottle of Coco Channel perfume, which up to now Grazina had only seen in magazine advertisements. In hard times, Grazina would dream about the perfume, but she could never afford such luxuries, the perfume being worth roughly four month's salary.
When I saw Grazina staring wistfully into the window, I thought of the unopened bottle of Coco Channel in my suitcase, which had been given to me by a friend back in Toronto.
Within days my group was leaving Vilnius for Tallin, Estonia.
I sent a note to the university for Grazina asking her to drop by my hotel after our departure. Before leaving, we left the perfume and a collection of rubles from my group that would be the eqivalent of her four month's salary.
As our plane was taxiing on the runway, there was Grazina with her husband and two daughters in tow, blowing wild kisses at the passengers.
I never heard from or saw the snow angel again. But wherever the winter of 1999 finds Grazina, I wish her warm boots, a thick coat and oceans of Coco Channel.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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