Swan Lake,” she said, her mind a million miles away as she thought about it. “It was a beautiful performance. … I didn't know it would be my last then. … I don't know why I kept the slippers…. It's all so long ago now, my love.” She seemed to shut the door on the memories, and then handed me a cup of hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream on it, and little shavings of chocolate and cinnamon.I wanted to ask her more about the ballet, but she disappeared for a while, and came back with her embroidery while I was doing my homework in her kitchen. I didn't get the chance that night, and it didn't come up again, not for years anyway. And eventually, I forgot about them. I knew she had danced with the ballet, we all did, but it was hard for me to imagine her as a prima ballerina. She was my grandmother, Granny Dan, the only grandmother in town with her own roller skates. She wore them proudly with one of her plain little black dresses, and when she went downtown, particularly to the bank, she always wore a hat and gloves, her favorite earrings, and looked as though she were going to do something important. Even when she picked me up at school in her ancient car, she looked dignified, and so happy to see me. It was so easy to see who she was then, and so much harder to remember who she had been. But I realize now that she had never wanted us to remember. She was by then who she had become, my grandfather's widow, my mother's mother, my grandmother who made Russian cookies. Anything beyond that was too much to dream, too much to even fathom.I wondered if Granny Dan lay awake at night, thinking of the past, and remembering what it felt like to dance Swan Lake for the Czarina and her daughters? Or had she let it all go years before, grateful for the life she had with all of us in Vermont? Her two lives had been extraordinarily different. So much so that it allowed us all to forget her past, to believe that she was someone different now, rather than who she had been in Russia. And she let us believe that, for all the years we knew her. In turn, we allowed her to forget about it, or forced her to, and we made her be the person it was comfortable for us to think she was. In my eyes, she had never been young. In my mother's, she had never been beautiful and glamorous and a ballerina. In her husband's, she had never been anything but his. He didn't even like hearing about her father and brothers. They were part of a world he no longer wanted her to be part of. Perhaps he didn't want her to remember.She was his, until he died, and left her to us. But she was mine, more than my mother's. They were never close, but we were. The beloved grandmother who meant everything to me … whose whimsy made me what I am, whose visions gave me the courage to leave Vermont. I went to New York after college, found a job in advertising, got married eventually, and had three children. I am married to a good man, have a life I love, and haven't worked in seven years. I'm planning to go back to work one day, when the children are a little older, when they don't need me at home so much, when I no longer feel I should be at home with them, making cookies. When I grow up, when I grow old, I want to be like Granny Dan one day. I want to wear roller skates in my kitchen, and go ice-skating, which I did with her and still love to do. I want to make my children and grandchildren smile, and remember the things I did for them. I want them to remember the Christmas bells, and decorating the tree with me, and the hot chocolate I make just like hers, while they do their homework. I want my life to mean something to them, and I want the time I spend with them to make a difference. But I want them to know who I was, too, and why I came here, and that I love their father very much.There are no mysteries in my life, no hidden stories, no victories like hers, dancing