Mom and I drove to a nearby village to a men’s clothing store looking for traditional-style German sweaters, the kind they wear with lederhosen. Instead I found a pair of knickers that tie below the knees, a style you don’t see in the States. The German men’s clothing designs were made to look American with their flashy script but wound up looking more European as a result, borderline garish, yet spoke to some strange part of me. It was more of a souvenir.

We used the app on my phone to navigate there but mom wanted to use her memory driving back. All the villages looked and sounded the same: Brackenheim, Bönnigheim, Erligheim, Bietigheim. They even reminded me of the villages in France, I told mom. Like that strange town we visited once in the south near the Pyrenees, where mom had a friend who rented his house out. That’s where we saw the scorpion in a window sill and mom smashed it dead with her hand. She just grabbed a paper towel and crushed it. I’ll never forget that. How it seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere and literally nothing was happening in that village. Whenever we drove into town everyone just looked up, then mumbled to one another sideways.

Even the little villages in England looked the same, I realized. There was a pattern to them all, perhaps their long history? Something about the mindset too. And it was here in mom’s old town Besigheim also. Time stood still, and felt suspended: the sound of the old clock tolling reminded you every 15 minutes how things stayed the same. After a while it became a kind of spell.

There was tension in mom’s village about how local investments were being made: disproportionately on tourism and development, the locals thought. They tried to cut down the hundred-year-old chestnut trees by the river but the locals bound together and pushed back and now the trees would live another day. Standing on the bridge by those trees it was nice to think that someone was advocating for them; people still believed in history.

Mom’s car didn’t have AC, it just blew hot air. We’d driven all the way to Prague like that in August the last time I came. You can get that fixed, I told mom. Was driving without AC a European thing or were we just being daft? If you have to ask, it’s the latter.

Us just replacing the small light bulbs in the hood of the oven took embarrassingly long. But I had to do it on principle: Eberhard always fixed everything. I wanted to show I could do this one small thing.

It’s the lights for the fan not the oven, Eberhard corrected me when I searched it up on Amazon. Ordering the bulbs online would be infinitely easier than finding them at the hardware store, Obie. But even getting into Amazon was a struggle, some backdoor way mom used to access the site from her email rather than her phone. And then it was a bad comedy routine watching Eberhard instruct her on how to reset her password. And we all felt old and enfeebled as a result.

Tonight we go to Tony’s new restaurant, the guy from Kosovo, and meet mom’s friend Helga who drinks and talks a lot. It’s “fish Friday” at the Rat, short for Ratsstüble: they once had a thing about not eating meat on Fridays, just ground it up and hid it in pasta as if God wouldn’t know.

I’ll take my walk up the Himmelsleiter before it gets too hot and burn off the tiramisu from last night. The sun looks hot pink coming over the ridge by the vineyards now and makes the edges of the trees and leaves look golden.

Categories: Memoir, travel, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel