This is a series of posts written from my mom’s house in Germany, this one titled the same as my first post on WordPress written 15 years ago this month.

And just like I did every time Eberhard picked us up at the airport, I dozed off on my way leaving it. The blurring landscape from the train looked no different than where I grew up in Pennsylvania: cornfields lined in perfect rows, highways and power lines, 80s-style plastic neon signs. Europe was surprisingly similar to what I’d known back home but Europe could surprise you too by being different than what you’d expect. I’d come here so many times it felt like home. And always one of my favorite parts was pulling into town on the first day. The familiar hillsides and clay-colored roofs, mom’s old village Besigheim.

When you come back home you want things to be the same. I still knew my way around mom’s old house in the dark, taking care to not hit my head on a wood beam and hunched low, arms stretched out like a sleepwalker. That familiar buzzing sound of the old heating unit, no other sounds but that. Foot-wide walls that had stood more than 500 years fixed to the same spot. The laundry room and its dark secrets, the smell of sphagnum moss, medieval plumbing. Leaning pantry shelves with jars of mustard and curry sauces, pickled pub onions. The house had a familiar smell and not all its smells were good but like the past it was real and I knew it. The small doorway to the dining room was like a portal to another world with a candle burning soft in the corner. Navigating through the dark like that in mom’s old house was like walking back in time, using my memory and senses to guide the way. The past was not dead; it made blooms of the present. And reliving it felt like a form of rebirth, spiritual.

In that photo of Eberhard by the stove he looked spry, as if smiling at his future self saying look who I am now, who I’ll always be.

I still knew this house well enough I felt like I belonged here. And maybe that’s why we don’t want things to change when we go back, we lose that sense of belonging.

When it was time I walked in the direction of the bells. And took the same walk I always do, up the Himmelsleiter and through the vineyards, by the river. It’s here I always feel most connected to this place. And I wondered, should we keep mom’s house and stay here ourselves, forever?

On my walk everything was the same, right down to the Keith Haring inspired paintings on the side of the trailer by the kids summer rodeo camp where they learned to ride ponies. There was progress and there was continuity. You could have both.

It was an American Western themed place, all done up in animal bones mounted on wooden signs, a small campfire scene where little ones could sit on mini tree stumps and talk. Maybe someday our kids could raise their kids here. It was such a tranquil, perfect place insulated from the rest of the world. A stream by a footbridge with signs to nearby villages, sweet morning birdsong. I got out my bird identifier app and recorded the calls on my phone: European Robin, Common Wood Pigeon, the Eurasian Blue Tit. I could record the songs, save them, and listen back! How nerdy was that.

The vines climbed over the crooked stone walls at the foot of the vineyards and the walls were staggered like that in measured increments up the hillsides the way the Romans had done it more than a thousand years before. There was a handed-down knowledge here we didn’t have in America. A connection to the past that maybe helped people love and respect their present more, out of reverence for it. Here in some random, non-descript spot a stone marked 1848. 1848! Our country was quite young then, and still is. If Europe was our elder selves we were still teenagers, in our 20s at best. We couldn’t be trusted to make adult decisions. Ours were more self-centered, short term.

I had memories of all these places, that bench by the stream where the path turned and I’d stopped one time to write. It was all still here, the same. And parts of me were too: still alive though forgotten.

Categories: Memoir, travel, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose, travel