21 Jan 25

All the rooms in mom’s house were irregular, the lines along the ceilings sloped or sagging. The toilet in her bathroom angled downwards. The problem I had with the old photos and going through them was they felt like remnants. The past comes to you in fragments. And that all left a broken vibe, pieces you never could fit back together, it just reminded you of how much else was gone. Like this photo from an apartment where I lived in ‘95, now the only picture of that place I have, a peephole into the kitchen and our old cat Pokey. Then another of us moving out, me pushing a cart of boxes. Thirty years ago now, me still a kid. Mom’s house has plenty of photos of us but they’re decades old, like time has stood still. And one day our house will feel that way too.

Mom agreed to let me box up these old videos and move them to another room. Her living area, on the second floor, is where she spends most of her time but there’s plenty of stuff we could move out that would help her mentally. We had big plans when we came here, she said, but John’s health went downhill and then he died in 2008. Those plans never materialized. Each time we visited we acted more like tourists; I wanted to start helping more.

She would have to pay the Stadt for the work on the collapsing barn but all plan approval went through them and was driven by the best interests of the town planning commission and their contractors. Christoph understood the local politics and offered to help. I wondered how much influence I had as a foreigner. The fear factor part of me just wanted her to get out of the house. They’d constructed an elaborate system of scaffolding and lumber to prevent the barn from collapsing onto a nearby pedestrian path. Mom would have to wait to hear what they wanted her to do and how much it would cost and this had been going on for years.

As with other past Mondays we decided to go for weisswurst so we could be out of the house when the cleaner came, and basically take the day off. Time got stuck and us with it. The air quality showed as “very poor” on my weather app, a blood red stain over central Europe. Something about the low and high systems was reversed Eberhard explained, and we had perpetual fog as a result. It was the San Francisco cold as Dawn called it, immediately got into your bones.

I took the Himmelsleiter route to warm up, the steep Roman steps that snaked through the vineyards above the train tracks to a view overlooking the region. I often stood up there in the saddle of the ridge looking down to Besigheim to locate mom’s house. Hers was white and twisted at a different angle than the others. It was like one of those Victorian villages we’d put out at Christmastime with fake amber lights and little lamp posts. And I was one of those figures inside with my coffee and sweater trying to keep warm, looking about the same as I did yesterday.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Nostalgia, travel