I’d visibly gained weight after my trip to Europe. The weight that hangs on the gut in flaps. I was way too proud for all that and felt dirtied by my own excess: bread, butter, cheese, pastries, cake.

I got up just as the heater kicked on back home, 0300. Forced myself to stay in bed but woke a lot earlier. I don’t mind the jet lag that has you up early unable to sleep, it’s the kind where you can’t stay awake I don’t like.

I lay in bed trying to remember mom’s family tree, the new names I learned like Zoller and Gates. The Rectors and Harpsters, a blend of German, Irish, English. Mom’s mother’s middle name, Ursula.

Our house in mid-October in the middle of the night, a new kind of darkness it seemed. That psychological autumn/winter darkness. No better time for candles and incense. All the clocks reset, ticking again.

Mom never took an interest in the old antique clocks they had and so now none of them work since John died. Dawn doesn’t have an interest in ours either. I took one of the smaller, mantel-sized ones off the shelf at mom’s house and tried to resurrect it but couldn’t. It spun for a few minutes, happy to perform its one role in life, but petered out. It was a real thing of beauty, maybe half a meter tall and brass, with a glass cloche and spinning gold-colored balls below. The clocks really were like a metronome and important to John, a musician, who had rhythm coursing through him at all times.

I took pictures of the village leaving it, felt really attached to the place like never before. Leaving for a train early on a Sunday it felt like you had the place all to yourself. Taking a pano from the river to the old town wall, the hills and Himmelsleiter in the background, then realizing two anglers were down by the bridge quietly adjusting their lines. The cobwebs by the flower boxes were still in bloom, a mashup of autumn and spring.

Even the musty smells in mom’s house had a nice quality I’d never noticed before. If my math was right the house was now five hundred and thirty-one years old. Of course it smelled, like an old dog. But it was real, like the earth. Or if history has a smell, like an old bookstore, a warm smell.

I’d been staying at that house longer than anywhere I’d ever lived. One day our kids would be with theirs parsing through old names like Pearse and Gibbard and where they all came from. Then all the names on my dad’s side; all the new families we’d become intertwined with.

Our old dog Ginger greeted me with glee and the cat, not so much. But I picked him up and squeezed him and he didn’t seem to mind. I helped Ginger up onto the ottoman so she could lay with Dawn and me as we watched TV and I tried to stay up until dark. I wanted to go back to Germany again in late winter but there were so many other places to go. Maybe mom and I could go somewhere warm. But we probably wouldn’t, it was just easier to stay at home.

I savored all the things I was responsible for back home like caring for the yard and cooking. It felt good Dawn and Charlotte were glad to have me home. Like a piece of a puzzle, snapping back into place.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose