Author Archives

Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

• Uncommon denominators

  By Bill Pearse on October 3, 2015 • ( 8 )

  

  Today we put down a deposit on a used car in a town we couldn’t pronounce that sounded like a slur or spit coming up — Eberhard got right on the used car search with his handy at the Bahnhof… Read More ›

• Who needs Munich when you’ve got the Wasen?

  By Bill Pearse on October 1, 2015 • ( 20 )

  

  For reasons perhaps too private to get into it’s hard peeing in lederhosen, hard undoing the suspenders through the clasps when you’ve been drinking, hard clearing the edge of the leather because they don’t come with flies or barn doors,… Read More ›

• Meet me at the cemetry gates

  By Bill Pearse on September 30, 2015 • ( 26 )

  

  We dropped the kids off for their first day of German school, their first class French — French taught in German — and I walked to the cemetery by the Realschule, where we’ve started our third week of German classes,… Read More ›

• How to love, with fences

  By Bill Pearse on September 29, 2015 • ( 14 )

  

  There are limits to my love as with fences to remind us what’s ours and keep things out, keep things in — Love is a word we use for protection, like all things defined there’s a start, an end, and… Read More ›

• Leaves clawing the cobblestones

  By Bill Pearse on September 28, 2015 • ( 11 )

  

  When the French arrive, it’s with armsful of things from France: breads wrapped in brown paper bags, coolers full of cheese, boxes of wine, even duvets for their beds. It feels like a hotel and we lose track of how… Read More ›

• First poem for fall

  By Bill Pearse on September 25, 2015 • ( 21 )

  

  That first fall something found me there, the greys and browns of northwest Pennsylvania, what little light you find come November, the last of the leaves flapping just a few here and there, and yet          … Read More ›

• Hit by a Cadillac

  By Bill Pearse on September 23, 2015 • ( 25 )

  

  The fourth night with the Boogie Woogie band at the wine festival here in Germany and it doesn’t sound as loud as it did the first three nights, our ears have gotten used to it. And as we resurface now… Read More ›

• I love my liver when I eat my lover

  By Bill Pearse on September 19, 2015 • ( 13 )

  Drinking beer in the morning in the kitchen cooking with a wife-beater and Tom Waits, finally found something the cat will eat that’s not decapitated, some calf’s liver in a yogurt sauce from a plastic packet mom adds olive oil… Read More ›

• The Highly Capable Program Nomination Ends Tomorrow

  By Bill Pearse on September 18, 2015 • ( 18 )

  

  When I was in school, they called it Gifted. After Gifted came Honours, and after that, was everyone else. Heike’s son Sascha speaks perfect English, with a delicate English accent (he’s 11) and explains how it works here in Germany:… Read More ›

• Pigs in zen

  By Bill Pearse on September 17, 2015 • ( 15 )

  

  We thought something was burning in the house, but it was just the Backhaus up the road, where the women gather to bake bread and gossip in the fall and burn clippings from the grape vines. We journeyed to Stuttgart… Read More ›