19 Jan 25

I went to Uwe and Miriam’s house on Schwalbenhälde and told them about our time at the hardware store trying to replace mom’s Küchenwasserhahn. No matter how well you communicate your problem, people working in hardware stores will pretend they don’t understand you. When we got home and opened it the new kitchen faucet had four internal hoses like the broken one but the cold water line was five centimeters too short. Mom’s lodger Laszlo made it fit by reusing parts of the old hose and jimmying it together. I cannot imagine living here and not speaking the language. When things break you need more than a few words to fix them.

We made plans to hike through the „Grünhütte“ near Kaltenbronn in the Black Forest and to go by train. Uwe and Miriam had two girls like us and their youngest was friends with Lily when we lived here in 2015-16. It seemed like now we could be closer friends if I made more effort. I read up on German politics so I could make small talk and Uwe was reading a book by Anne Applebaum called Autocracy, Inc., so we had lots in common: the rise of their racist party and ours. It wasn’t like those people had grown in numbers; they’d just gotten more public about their beliefs.

Uwe and Miriam had almost bought mom’s house when it was for sale in 2004 but then learned an American and Englishman had purchased it. They wanted an old place to fix up but feared it would be a money hole, and they were right about that. Now the Stadt was demolishing the adjacent barn on mom’s property due to the failing roof, taking it down to the bricks, mom said.

Visiting another friend Benny in Ludwigsburg I realized there was a pattern to heating old places here: the warmth gets localized to select parts of the house. It doesn’t come to you; you go to it. That’s what made daily bathing so hard, you had to get naked. I hadn’t really taken my socks off for a week.

Benny said he could come visit me or I could see him in Ludwigsburg, he lives just a few minutes from the station, so I went to him so I could take the train. It was only two stops but made me feel more European to go by train. Everyone was wearing scarves and smoking underneath the non-smoking signs. Benny said I’ll meet you at the track, it will be more romantic. When I saw him we hugged and went for a coffee and met his Spanish girlfriend Tina. He’s 46 and when we first met, wasn’t quite 30. He said seeing you is like going through a doorway in time.

The neighbor upstairs was an opera singer and didn’t mind the sound of Benny recording below. He’d scaled back his teaching commitments to allow more time for making music and was doing his own bookings like a salesman he said, making contacts at festivals and nightclubs. He cited my stepdad John as an inspiration and showed me the turquoise ring John gave him.

Eberhard spent the night and in the morning he goes through mom’s mail. An old pipe burst in her laundry area a few months back and water got into the oil tank somehow which is bad because water is heavier than oil and thus sinks to the bottom of the tank, which can damage the heater, and now a guy is coming on Mittwoch to clean it out. But Eberhard fears they will remove the oil and then try to sell it back to mom, and to make sure they don’t since I will be here when the guy comes. I think that will take more than a few words to fix.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel