The home, aka khutta, of our grandmother, Katerinna Ivanovna, comprised the half-dark veranda-hallway, the kitchen with a window viewing the 2 stairs beneath the outside entrance door to the veranda, and the brick stove in the opposite corner next to which stood the leaf of the constantly open door to the only room in the khutta. The space between the whitewashed walls there all day long remained submerged in the perpetual limbo-like dusk oozing in thru the room's window from the solid shade under the giant Elm in the two-meter wide backyard, who also shadowed half of the neighboring yard of the Turkovs at Number 17.
Turning round the farthermost corner in the second veranda, you reached the last, fourth, door belonging to the khutta of old man Duzenko and his wife. They also had the same-sized sequence of hallway-kitchen-room, yet by 2 windows more than in Grandma Katya’s khutta because of the symmetry in layout—the 2 windows viewing the street called for 2 windows looking into the common yard.
2 mighty American Maples with pointed fingertips in their open-palm leaves grew in the yard right next to each of the Duzenko's additional window. The wide gap between the tree trunks was filled by a squat stack of red bricks, brittle with their age, which old man Duzenko kept all his life for a possible reconstruction of his khutta in some future time.
About six meters away from the breastwork between the Maples and parallel to it, there stretched a long shed of ancient dark gray boards, whose blind wall had blind doors secured by sizable one-eyed padlocks. Their respective owners kept there fuel for the winter, and in an enclosure within Grandma Katya’s fuel section lived a pig named Masha.
Opposite the veranda in the barren Vine coat, one more huge Elm and a timber-fence separated the common yard from the neighbors at Number 21. Next to the Elm, there stood a small shed plastered with the mixture of clay, cow dung, and chopped straw, which also was padlocked to secure the earth-cellar of the Pillutas inside it. The Duzenkos’ earth-cellar shed of bare boards stood farther away from the street and as if continued the long common shed, being separated from it by the passage to the kitchen gardens.
Between those two earth-cellar sheds, there stood a small lean-to structure covering the lid over Grandma Katya’s earth-cellar—a vertical shaft two-plus-meter deep, with a wooden ladder going down, into the dark between the narrow earth walls. At the bottom, the flashlight disclosed 4 niches caved in on all four sides and slightly deeper than the shaft bottom under ladder legs. That’s where they stored potatoes and carrots for the winter, and beets too because the frost couldn’t reach the stored vegetables at such depth.