This is a series of posts written from my mom’s house in Germany.
Many of the restaurants and people I know are gone late August but some are starting to trickle back before I leave, in early September. So the town is more quiet than normal and can feel suspended in time.
This morning the house was so cool from leaving the windows open I had to get a jacket and was glad to see my favorite wool Pendleton is still in mom’s front closet. It’s odd, if I were to open the drawers in the kitchen table or TV room I’d likely find the same pictures and notes from years ago, when we last lived here. Going back like that feels both comforting and voyeuristic, like I’m poking around in places I shouldn’t.
Maybe it’s this house, one of the oldest in the village, that exudes such a strong spirit of the past because it’s never been altered in the 500 years it’s stood here. It’s all been about preservation, holding on to what’s been.
The local historical society made a deal with my mom to occasionally take people through her Keller, or wine cellar, that’s below the house. They also agreed to help her restore the roof on her old barn, though their timeline for construction is on that same epic historical scale, where progress is measured in years.
Even this small stack of CDs in the corner by the heating unit is the same from what I last picked out a couple years ago when I last visited mom in August. Which makes me wonder if mom’s life has been in suspension too. Or if someone would feel that way about my life were they to look—which could feel more like prying.
Isn’t it that way for anyone who returns home and snoops around their parent’s house? What would it feel like when my kids did that one day, and started examining the contours of my life as I grow old?
Life can narrow down within itself, the house, and all our things, settling into a homeostasis. Life stops changing, then seems to forget how. Being stuck in the past can make you feel like a ghost, and ghosts have a way of getting trapped in places they once inhabited and can’t escape.
I was glad for the Pendleton; it fit like it always did. Glad I knew just where it was in mom’s closet, and where it would be the next time.
Change is what ghosts can’t create for themselves and maybe that’s what has them trapped. That ball and chain they wear is the past. There’s something about it they just can’t let go.
Bill Pearse 
as I read your poignant posts Bill, I am both warmed and saddened at the place your mother so obviously holds in your heart. You must have had a loving g upbringing, so sadly missing in this day and age. Beautifully nostalgic
blessings
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That’s beautiful! Thank you for this my friend, much appreciated and very insightful. Thank you for reading!
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The following is from one of my all time favourite books, ‘Pebbles from my skull’ by Stuart Hood, 1963. Your post helped to raise a fragment from the depths of my memory.
~
Prologue
Memory is not merely recall. Some things we choose to forget. Some, which we cannot forget, we make bearable. Life washes through us like a tide. In its ebb and flow the fragments of the past are ground smooth so that, with time, we can handle them like stones from a rock pool, admiring their colour, shape and texture. We do not know which of them may rattle as the tide ebbs from us for the last time. These are the pebbles from my skull.
~
Thank you, Bill for rattling this battered old brain box.
Be well and do good.
Erleben.
DD
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What a passage there from that book David, such a great image. The erosion bit is a vivid detail especially. Yeah memory is so funny, and one’s relationship with the past. I’m clearly working mine out live, and appreciate you ruminating with me and doing the same I hope from your station in life. It is not merely recall at all, and it changes somehow: maybe changes us even, or has ongoing influence on us (the past can prevent us from changing too). Endless angles to consider! Be well and do good, good sir.
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Thank you Bill.
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Hard relate Bill. I’m staying at my mum’s after the Edinburgh festival and a hip replacement. It’s like the French say, “Plus .ca change, plus c’ est la meme”… The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Lorna, Hit The North U.K.
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Lorna! So good to hear from you. Sorry the hard relate I suppose. Thank you for sharing that French phrase; I should finish what I started with my study of that beautiful language. Was just talking with my mom about Scotland (and Edinburgh) recently, and of all our travels in the UK several years back Scotland is where I’d return to first; again starting in the north (Inverness) then perhaps returning to the Orkneys, down to Oban, out via Stranraer to Belfast by boat if we were to retrace our route. Hit the north!
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After this latest piece about revisiting your Mom and the vibes of the memories and of a stasis in time, it occured to me I was lacking anything to relate with. I moved across the country at 20, and visited my folks just a few days a year. And now, they’ve both been gone 20 plus years so even what few memories there are, are faded.
So you may think you’re snooping, or prying, or holding on, but really what you’re doing is building or rebuilding fresh memories for a day when you may not be able to anymore. That seems like a thing worth doing. Nobody’s really gone until they’re forgotten.
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I love that Dave and you’re exactly right. In fact a lot of the impetus for this blog was inspired by a time I read my stepdad John’s Wiki page after he’d died, and felt so sad seeing his rich life whittled down like that. That’s the way we’ll go of course, reduced to a column or two, but I wanted to savor and preserve more of my life both for myself and my kids, and anyone who cares. Glad and grateful you’re one who does! Appreciate you sharing your story here too, and lovely photographs.
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Hmmm…ghosts as beings trapped by their inability to let go. An idea to explore…
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Hi 👋 Carl and thank you for reading! Scrooge theme here this week in Germany, it seems 😉
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Hopefully the three overnight ghosts won’t disrupt your sleep too badly.
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Really! This house is so old I think there have likely been generations of them that have already come and gone.
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I am drawn to the idea of a ghost as metaphor for something unfinished, something needing attention but hovering just outside awareness.
And then there is anticipatory grieving, of course.
Rich pickings today, Bill. Thank you.
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Thank you Bruce! A Chinese writer I just finished reading named Yiyun Li had an essay about the origin of the word “haunt” I’ll need to go back to and share with you at some point; there’s a lot of rich layers in that memoir in how the past holds us and vice versa, can even scour us out if we’re not careful.
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