Somewhere mom got this new painting, possibly from the old barn they just cleaned out, of a medieval-looking village by a tall stone wall beside a flowing river. It isn’t her village but could be, as there must be hundreds of small places that look like that. It’s the first morning I’m up after dark and the sun lights the Schrank in the corner of her dining room by the little doorway, the one I used to hit my head on and now mom has a thing hanging there to remind people to duck when they pass through. On the other side of that door is where Dawn hung the large map of Scotland we used to plan our month-long visit there in 2015, that kicked off our three-month tour of the UK that winter.

Now my mom has a Hungarian lodger named Laszlo who lives on the top floor in one of the rooms our kids used to stay in. He’s a mechanic who’s friends with one of the cooks at Frank’s restaurant by the Rathaus, and Frank is the brother of Tanya, who married the French guy Claude, and Claude is the guy who invested in a few properties here at the same time and squeezed out the prior owners which for a time was frowned upon — but Frank’s restaurant was so indisputably good I think people got over it. And Claude’s wife Tanya is a local, and that probably made a difference too.

It was Claude who helped my mom finally get rid of all John’s music instruments too, roughly a hundred collectible acoustic guitars he’d amassed on the top floor opposite Laszlo’s room: mom sat on those instruments for many years, weighted down by the thought of them. Claude had a brother who dealt in collectibles and got mom a good price for them, took them all. We all trusted it was a good price and that’s what mattered most—and what surely would have mattered to John, who’d bought and sold instruments on the internet and was quite good at it.

Now the instrument room was empty, with a placard outside it from the historical society in German explaining what that room was originally used for way back. The upstairs had a spooky quality to it and our kids sometimes complained of weird dreams, perhaps due to the little doorway leading to the attic, the fact none of us had ever been up there but occasionally something would die in that space and smell bad (a rat, bat, or bird) and there was the story of a past owner, an alcoholic dentist, who’d killed himself here in the house, and when my mom and John bought it the place had been unkempt for a while, with strange drunken things written on the wall by the dentist’s teenage kids. No one anywhere is spared such weird life details like this, especially my mom or John.

Laszlo has been living here for more than a year now, and befriended my mom, even calls her “mom” as a kind of joke. And it’s a comfort to know there’s a good man nearby for my mom, now 75; his name is even on the mail slot by the front door, good to know she’s not living alone.

The house is so definitively my mom’s, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like living here without her. As it was with her place in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania the house is decorated in John’s style, with most of John’s things still arranged the way he placed them — now roughly 20 years ago. And for that it feels stuck in time, at times stagnant. Even the photos are mostly from that era, when our kids (and all of us) were many years younger. There’s even a photo of Eberhard as a young boy wearing a traditional Austrian sweater, black and white. He looks the same somehow.

And there are many other photos of Eberhard through the years, often with a guitar, or one in his police outfit on a motorcycle, and at times it’s odd to think how he took the place of John in a sense, as a partner to my mom and musician himself, odd that Eberhard and John knew one another before my mom and John did. Odd that Eberhard knew of John growing up and even learned to play guitar through John’s books and TV show on the BBC, then finally met him at a guitar trade show in Frankfurt. And yet there’s nothing nefarious about Eberhard’s relationship with my mom now, the fact the two of them got together after John died. It just makes sense.

I’ll go to Eberhard’s place in the country later this week to stay in that creepy abandoned house across the street from his mother’s place and we’ll sit in his backyard with a fire and grill sausages and I’ll watch Eberhard smoke. He doesn’t walk so well now due to an injury and mom says his gut’s gotten bigger which isn’t good for older men, especially smokers.

Mom set aside a number of John’s old books, the ones he wrote, manuals for guitar players to learn the finger picking method, how to play the banjo or balalaika, you name it, John did it. The pages are yellowing and the illustrations are beautiful. I’ve set them all aside to fit into my carry-on, along with a metal turtle with strange engravings, also from the barn, that mom or no one else seems to know anything about.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel