22 Jan 25

In the morning the frost looked like snow on the rooftops and roads and made for art photography that never came out right. I liked the town better when it was empty and closed down and imagined this is how it was a long time ago. The sound of the DHL guy dragging a hand truck across the cobblestones would have been a horsedrawn cart. Here they still have travel agencies and the same guy working inside one with an illustrated poster of Australia out front, where I look for my friend Bruce on the southern shore. Some restaurants are only open Wednesdays through Sundays, some just until 1500 each day; some close for weeks on end and I can understand why. It feels like everyone is just waiting it out until spring.

On my walk it’s so socked in it’s easy to get lost and feels like being on the shoulders of some large mountain where the shapes are made ghostly and distorted by fog. Then a woman with a long white coat and matching white hair appears with two small dogs off leash: must be the farmer’s wife, as their tracks lead back through the snow/frost to a stone structure and tractor then disappear. I count the days since I’ve been here and what’s remaining. The weird way time bends when you break your routine. Making plans is like piecing together a puzzle and filling in the borders. A lunch date here, a weekend in France there.

Mom didn’t know the heater from the air conditioner. One was on the floor, the other by the ceiling; neither interested her: “I’ve got the heating pad, I’m fine.” Which made me feel like a wimp for turning my heater on, for whining about it on my blog.

I tried to coax her to pack up some unneeded things like video tapes or old magazines but there’s a real art to persuading someone to reconcile their belongings I don’t understand. Requires a lot of internal motivation. She went through a Rolodex that belonged to John and threw it out, that’s a start.

We had lunch reservations at 1230 and got a table in the back where we could people-watch the locals at the locals table (the Stammtisch) talking and drinking beer, and I remembered what the place was like before when the Croatians owned it and we sat at that same table with the kids talking and drinking beer ourselves. It was weird. The place looked the same but not really. I gave thanks for being sober in my quiet, private way.

I had to meet Christoph at the archivist place where he was preparing for a family event this Samstag and invited me along to hear what the archivist had found in the town records. They unrolled a large piece of paper, his grandfather’s family tree, with tiny boxes extending outwards from the center on both sides. It looked like a seating chart for a theater: the boxes ran to the edges of the paper and stopped in the 1500s. They ended there because they lost a lot of records in the Thirty Years War. Beyond that only tax records remained. The names of each family were handwritten in the small boxes like a dinner reservation. I imagined how many boxes I could fill in for my family and if we’d make it out of the 1900s.

In the morning I put on my slippers and crept down the creaking stairs, pulled back the blanket that hung from the doorway to keep the draft down. Hobbled toward the kitchen but first put on the portable heater and then the light, the speaker, the coffee maker. The Christmas candle arch in the window lit the whole room. With the doors closed the small heater warmed it. The days ran together and mom kept asking what was happening when.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, travel