This is a series of posts written from my mom’s house in Germany that begins here, and ends with this post.

I came and went on a Thursday. Took the old walk my last day, the one mom calls her winter walk. Tried to remember what I could from that first time we were here, but only flickers. Dawn and I were still in our 30s, mom just 60. But the fields still look the same and it feels like going back in time.

Mom gets her laptop and makes me listen to a song by a Welsh singer doing a Springsteen cover, and I realize we’ve watched it before. The guy is doing a small house concert and near the end of the song he starts narrating about how it was written in the same three chords. One step up and two steps back. Deceptively simple on the surface, but Bruce is trying to say something more. I want to write like that too.

Mom calls it her winter walk because she takes a different route in the summer, the one by the river where it’s cooler. But in the winter it must be cold in the fields because it’s exposed. There’s something calming in the pattern of the tilling, how the earth extends out in perfectly even rows. It’s so open it gives me that peaceful feeling I get when looking at the sea. There’s only the fields and the far-off hills with the vineyards staggered on the sides and the steep Roman steps, like the ones I climbed up the Himmelsleiter. And the same small concrete building they must use for farm equipment, the graffiti mural that’s been there for years. Mine is a kind of graffiti too I think, a way of saying I was here. Done in the dark, secretive.

We could be anywhere and time would drain down like this. Coming back to familiar spots is a way of holding on, of not letting go. Walking by the public swimming pool catching glimpses of scenes through the trees. Memory was like that too. Glimpses of my time with the kids when they were young. But like those old instant Polaroids we used to have growing up, not much happens anymore when you shake the prints, they just stay white.

At the end of my walk the playground, or Spielplatz, was empty. It looked the same as it did when we lived here with our kids. They had bouncy, spinning, climbing things just like they did 15 years ago. It made me feel sentimental, fixed in time but empty too.

I don’t sew but it feels like that when you end a walk the way you started, by closing the loop. Symmetrical and full. Maybe going back was a way of denying the loss, pretending it wouldn’t end when we all knew it would. And whether it was true or not I didn’t care, I was happy to pretend.

Thanks all for reading and as they say in Germany, bis näschstes mal: see you next time.

Categories: Memoir, travel, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel