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 ›
Memoir
Pigs in zen
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 ›
Hearts wrapped in cloth
It sounds like a joke, two Turks and a Kurd in our German class replaced by two Croatian construction workers and an Afghan refugee, but it’s no joke really when we go around the class and say where we’re from,… Read More ›
A ribbon of darkness all the way
There are prehistoric smells in my mom’s laundry area where the drain water from the washer sometimes gathers and the floor’s a stark grey stone material, a peat bog of sphagnum moss collapsing in on itself, which makes a fine… Read More ›
Return of the cold toilet seats
Eberhard’s mom had German measles when she was pregnant with his sister, causing his sister to suffer from a variety of autoimmune diseases, loss of hair at a young age, rheumatism — now she needs a hip replacement, which is complicated… Read More ›
First day of school in Germany, take 2
Starting our year of homeschooling today was like a kick-off meeting for a big project: give them a little information, get them engaged, show them a plan, have them leave the room excited. Start and end on time. And as… Read More ›
The importance of turning back
In the first draft of my memoir, which I left behind in the States because it has a bad energy objects sometimes can, I began with a scene from 1993 that traces the start of my career to its source,… Read More ›
Cooking French in southern Germany
Competitive beer drinking season has started here in the south of Germany, or maybe never ended, and I celebrated today with a traditional Bavarian lederhosen purchase, made from real cow hide if we’re translating it right, and I look nothing… Read More ›
They scratched their names on the stones, in the trees
Dawn took the side of the bed my mom once slept in and that left me the side that was John’s. I’d sometimes look in on him sleeping before we flew back home, but wouldn’t wake him, it was easier… Read More ›
Once there was a way to get back homewards
My dad told my 91-year-old grandmother, his mom, we’ve moved to Germany for nine months and she seems OK with it, she says. They live about 20 minutes from each other in Pennsylvania — my dad, his sister Sue and… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 