2 Feb 25

Now the train moved in reverse as it left the station. I always enjoyed bookending my arrival in Germany with a mirror image at the end. From the time I first saw mom waiting for me at the platform to the time I left, we’d fit a lot between. 

I had a lot of nerve complaining about the cold in mom’s house when weeks before I’d been boasting about my all-cold showers back home. But now I could even sleep with no clothes on in that virtually unheated room.

The heater had two knobs but didn’t engage for hours once activated. I couldn’t understand its logic and just hoped for the best. Trying to move the heater to inspect its inner workings just exposed bizarre, hidden things below: what appeared to be clumps of fur with gel vitamin supplements stuck to them, probably dropped on the floor by the American folk singer Sonia, who stayed in this same bedroom for long spans with her wife Terry when she toured Germany. In fact Sonia had left a leather jacket, a stack of her unsold CDs, and various other travel items in the Schrank. So did Cadillac Kolstad, the boogie-woogie pianist from Minneapolis. He had a bunch of old flyers and merch stashed in the music room upstairs opposite mom’s Hungarian lodger Laszlo’s room. Musicians could be like vermin that way: see one, and imagine how many others must be hiding in the dark.

Throughout the house there were so many antique clocks you could lose track of them. Some very, very old standing quietly in a dark corner. Others hanging from the walls or perched on a high shelf. Last night I got one going and wondered when it tolled, was it the first time this clock had run since John was alive? He would have been the last one to wind it since mom never took interest in them. And it still had that wound tension in its system to release a musical note, weird. I loved filling the house with the sound. It was like being in a clockmaker’s workshop, all these different bells chiming. The sound of time marked like that was just another excuse for music, and that’s why John loved the clocks. The hearkening back to another time.

There was often the smell of sweet wood burning from some place. And the old houses fanned out in irregular patterns around the little cobblestone roads. Some guy from the Stadt, a city worker in a fluorescent vest, had come by mom’s in the morning telling us in German about a problem we needed to address with one of mom’s gutters, gesturing how it was maybe causing the sand around the cobblestones to loosen and create a trip hazard. We couldn’t understand him and had to call Eberhard. Eberhard said later he had some kind of electric snake that was seven meters long he could use. Everything seemed so foreign.

In the morning I walked to the Bahnhof and met Uwe and Miriam and their French friend Florence, who owned the local tea shop. We caught the 0750 to Pforzheim, changed there, then took a small bus to a trail head at the northern edge of the Black Forest. Uwe explained why it was called the Schwarzwald, on account of the trees being so dense no light could get through. But the Dutch had cut so many down and hauled the wood up the Reine to build bridges and boats. Now a lot of the trees were young, and tourism (and annual snow amounts) had dwindled so that small, once-vibrant nearby villages were now looking empty.

There was a light dusting of snow and it was a perfect winter day. We walked across the moor and talked about the origin of the word. Then stopped at a country inn for a large hot lunch and got a table in the sun. Uwe went back inside and got two plates of the famous American-style (how you call them?) pancakes with the local blueberries. The Germans call this a Pause and we languished in it.

It was dark when I got back to Besigheim and hurried up the road with my rucksack trying to get warm. Mom had some candles going and cheese out, with olives and cornichons. Now I was getting sad I’d have to leave, but there was still time. And mom had gotten the stuff for me to make the spinach orzo dish again. There was just enough spinach in the bag for one more dish.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Black Forest, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, travel