Nancy Hepner Goodman

“If you see a Russian flag in front of the grade school run home as fast as you can.” My mother told me this during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. I was seven years old. Mom also came up with a family code we were to use if war broke out, separating us from each other.

                        “Deep in the forest lived a lively family of animals.”

It was the first line of my favorite bedtime story, and the code would help us find each other. I didn’t understand how it would work or why we needed it. It seemed like a different version of treasure hunt, a game we played for hours in the backyard. I couldn’t fathom war, being separated from my parents, or having strangers raise me. 

Yet in Ukraine, children are being taken to Russia and placed in new homes, with new Russian parents. Mom’s fears weren’t far-fetched.

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War didn’t break out in the United States. I quit looking for the American flag at school, and took democracy for granted. My mother never spoke about codes again, and by the 1970’s she’d moved on from Russian worries to making Russian tea. This wasn’t the black tea consumed by upper-class Russians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a combination of Tang, ice tea concentrate, lemonade mix, sugar, cinnamon and ground cloves. She heard about it from a church friend, and joined the craze, passing it out in mason jars during the holidays.  

As an Irish American, my mother loved having a cup of tea in the afternoon. She drank tea with my grandmother and then eventually she drank Russian tea with me. We’d watch the teapot until it boiled, lifting it from the burner before the high-pitched whistle.  Two tablespoons of the dirt-colored concoction were measured into brown ceramic mugs, then the hot water was added. For a touch of fancy my mother put a long stick of cinnamon into each drink. We’d sit clutching the steaming mugs in our hands, enjoying idle chatter.   

I lost the handwritten Russian Tea recipe my mother gave me with her easy flow of cursive writing, so different than the jagged scribbles later in her life. The internet and store provided all the information and ingredients I needed. I mixed the tea and sipped the spicy sweetness, so soothing on bitter cold days.

I now wonder what stories parents in Ukraine whisper to their children, their own family codes, as the war rages on into a second year.