Antonina

"You're great grandmother would have loved you so much," my grandmother often told me. She caressed my face and looked into my big brown eyes with her own. I could tell she was looking at me and imagining what her mother would have thought, how proud and loving she would have been, how sad it was that she wasn't around to see me.

I though of what my great grandmother must have been like. I had only ever seen her in small, blurry, black and white photographs, ones that reminded me of a time before cameras. She wore a dark dress and apron on her round figure with short curly hair and thick, circular glasses. I always thought of this photo when I imagined her. The idea of her forced me to think of someone more cozy and loving than my grandmother, which was hard for me to do. But this was the person that taught my grandmother everything she knew, how to cook and make meatballs, sew a dress or crochet a blanket, all the things a great grandma needed to know. I figured she must have been like my grandmother in a number of other ways: gentle, caring, and always willing to make ice cream cones with extra scoops.

My great grandmother came from Kombornia, Poland, a small village located in the Southeast part of the country. Her name was Antonina Ballivajder, but my grandmother and Aunt Steffie always called her Bocky, which apparently meant 'mother' in polish. When Antonina was just seventeen years old she made the trip across the Atlantic to America with the hope for a better life, a life superior to the one lived in the poor rural areas and farmlands of Poland.

She moved to Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and started a life, poor still though it was, in the United States. She had her first children, five of them, with , who passed away young.