It is six years ago now and we are making plans to move to Germany. The kids will be at a good age, we’ll all learn the language. I’ll quit my job and take time to plan our next move. We can rent our house out and take the pets. My mom’s place is big enough for all of us and we can do some traveling while we’re there. It is the summer of 2014 and Dawn and I are on a date with my mom’s partner Eberhard at a blues concert in the wine cellar of some medieval fortress with views as far as you can see, south to the Black Forest, north to Stuttgart, Frankfurt beyond. Farms reminding me of where I grew up, Pennsylvania Dutch country. In the photo I am wearing a cheap leather jacket I borrowed from Eberhard and I’m smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, my hair unwashed and greasy, pulled back. Dawn is on a bench beside me (also smoking) and we have the look of a young couple struck by the romance of Europe, that travel glow. Germany wins the World Cup. When we move in a year later the first thing my mom says is I don’t know what I’m going to do when you leave. And we laugh, but it’s true. It is now five years later, “hindsight is 20/20.” I wrote a short draft documenting my work the past 15 years and read it on the flight to Germany, then never again. You think some things need to be preserved, but maybe you should just let them go.

Categories: identity, prose, travel, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, Memoir, mid-life crisis, nostalgia, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer