BESIGHEIM, 5th—II—2025

Wrapped tightly in my sheets and blankets like being inside a sarcophagus trying to get warm. The tingly feeling something’s about to happen: that’s travel. So foreign yet familiar, my second home.

Looking down from the saddle on the ridge in the early morning dark the lamp posts were still lit in mom’s village. The Deutsche Bahn whipping around the corner with little squares of light blurring from its wagons, a model train. I liked the very old, steep stone steps that curled through narrow corridors towards the center of town. Some chipping at the edges; a rusted iron handrail. Like the alleys of Inverness or Edinburgh they called closes, each felt like a secret passageway to a far-away past.

That tingly feeling was almost gone I’d been here so long, my fourth Wednesday. I’d read a couple books and started rereading a third, Cloud Atlas, which I’d last read when we lived here in 2015. A series of six interrupted narratives from different times all tied together. I loved it so much I’d modeled my journal entries in a similar style back then. Thought rereading it might help me regain that voice—but trying to repeat yourself as a writer is death.

Eberhard came for a final visit but said maybe we take 20 minutes cutting down the vines first, it’s required by the end of February (it was only the Third). So he got the battery-powered clippers out and started, then gestured to the pile of clippings on the ground: Now you can do this. He demonstrated how to use the hedge trimmer, to cut the vines into little symmetrical pieces, and start from the top. I didn’t actually feel like pruning. But the scene was an odd throw-back to former times. In fact I realized we’d trimmed these same vines before, one winter. Dechez-vous, Groundhog Day.

He was 70 now and I wondered if he should be climbing ladders and leaning like that, with all the huffing and puffing and the bulged disc in his lower back. And yet there was an odd, almost father-son tension I felt as he told me what to do. Still I loved him for it. I gathered all the small clippings by hand, though my fingers were numb. We stuffed them in a large bag and fit it in the back of his car.

Standing back looking at the massive exposed Fachwerk, how the sun lit it and exposed the peeling paint, I pictured the vines green in the summer and fanned out across the face of it, how mom knew it was bad to let the vines grow like that but wouldn’t relent, she loved the look of it so much. She was tied to this house. If you ever sell it don’t let someone renovate it, she said. You could get attached to homes like that, they had a way of drawing you in.

Mom found a couple large antique marionette puppets stuffed in a closet, angry Japanese faces and sequined costumes, one with the head dangling from a string, both about the weight and size of a small toddler, tangled together and musty smelling. Mom hated the puppets; she tossed them in a bunch on the floor, so I offered to just throw them out (sure, we could try to sell or donate them but it felt better to bury them somewhere deep—they radiated pure evil), and as I fit them in the garbage bag mom threw something else down the steps, an old planner that once belonged to John, with all his personal contacts and business cards—so I put that in with the puppets, tied the bag, and dropped it in a trash bin outside. Maybe we’d loosened some clogged drain now. Maybe she’d keep going.

The tingly feeling radiated out from the center of my chest to my arms and legs. It was the anticipation of what comes next: taking to the dark morning, climbing the road to the end and turning right: dropping to the foot path and river, climbing the old stone steps one last time to the saddle.

Last time until the next time—bis nächsten Mal.

Thank you for reading this series of posts from my most recent trip to Germany!

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Cloud Atlas, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, travel