Here's how our former dacha neighbors are going to spend $100,000 they've made on the sale of their little plot and house:

They are a family of six: grandfather and grandmother, who lived at the dacha fulltime; their daughter, her husband, and two little girls - Sonya, 3, and Veronica, 1 (funny, but it always pleases me to encounter namesakes, doesn't happen too often here, though :))

The daughter's family had a two-room apartment. They've sold it, added $50,000 and bought a three-room place. The kids will now have a room of their own, their parents will have a bedroom in addition to a living-room. Way cool.

The other half of the sum bought them a country house for the grandparents, outside Kyiv but not far from it. They've already moved, but while they were still living here, they adopted a puppy, which they hoped would guard the new place from intruders. My mother gave them some tips on the puppy's unbringing, advised them against beating it, and they seemed grateful to her for this little lesson in dog psychology. In fact, it was my mother who told me all about their situation and the dacha sale: they just kept telling her everything as she was walking with Marta outside our place. She would've made a great journalist, my mother...

Anyway, they seem settled and I hope things will go well for them. Our landlord seemed a bit upset when I told him about their departure: the grandfather, it turns out, used to make really good wine from the grapes that grow in our garden. We, on the other hand, are making really good grape juice out of it, now that most of the apples are gone.

As for those who've bought the place, I know nothing about them and wouldn't really care to know where they are getting their money from. Honestly, I'm more worried about those poor souls who may consider breaking into our place to steal the TV set and the chairs.

I'm mentioning this here now because my mother has somehow managed to make another neighbor open up to her today: a woman with a 2-year-old girl, who lives in a really big house behind a really big brick fence, who is scared shitless to stay there when her husband's away, because this past summer some guys managed to rob them - and did it twice, on two nights in a row. The first time, the house stood empty, but the second time, there were people asleep in it, and all the lights on the ground floor - as well as the TV in one of the bedrooms - were on. Wild.