Join me this month for stories of our time here in a small German village where we’re visiting with my mom. I’m experimenting with straight journal-style blogging as a ‘post-a-day’ challenge. Thanks for reading, Bill 

Lily and I went for a lunch date, which we’ve been meaning to do for a while now. We stopped in the Vietnamese restaurant that opened since our last visit, and seems odd to me, a Vietnamese place in such a small, traditional German town. But they had pho and bún on the menu and I ordered for the two of us, got Lily a coke. It was just the two of us and the cook/owner with no sounds other than him chopping and the sizzling of oil for our spring rolls. Then another couple came in and ordered, followed by the strange woman across the road by the butcher who owns a massage business, whom Dawn and I met when we first came a couple summers ago, who tried to convince Dawn and I to come see her, but seemed to have a different motive we couldn’t pinpoint, just felt odd. I saw her from the corner of my eye and turned away, but then she heard us speaking English, and bent down on my periphery until her body was almost parallel to the ground, trying to catch my eye. I didn’t say anything to Lily and luckily Lily didn’t see her either, as the woman was on Lily’s right-hand side, and her hair falls down in a wave there now, eclipses half her face.

Afterwards we decided on a walk down by the river, and Lily remembered it was the same walk we took that last day before we left in 2009. I said I had a picture of her from then and she said we should come back and take another photo from the same spot.

Lily pointed out the two swans on the far shore—did I remember when we were last here, watching the mother swan and her two eggs hatching? Maybe it’s the same ones, she said.

They want to develop part of the river shore and there’s a petition in town to block it. It would require cutting down some old trees and likely paving things over, but frankly I think it would look better: the trees are kind of gray and sickly looking, but maybe it’s just this time of year they look that way.

Eberhard asked what day we’re going back, the 28th or 29th—he needs to make arrangements to take us to the airport because his mother’s sick, he lives with her and takes care of things.

We’ll get back the same time of day we leave Frankfurt, reclaim the nine hours we lost, like getting the coin back on a deposit for something you’ve returned.

Categories: Memoir, travel

Tags: German culture, journal writing, mid-life crisis, No Christmas in Germany, postaday, travel, William Pearse writer