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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Our map of the UK still hangs on the Schrank in my mom’s dining area crooked and blocky, like some kid at the high school dance who’s just going to keep sitting there on the sides all night, unnoticed. I really… Read More ›
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 ›
I asked Lily to write the word beautiful in her journal and then draw an X through it. I said be careful about using this word in your writing (she used it twice in the same paragraph), and we talked… Read More ›
Summer ends so fast here it’s like they’re taking down a theatre set and replacing it with autumn, overnight. Eberhard has a saying, «I’m a man, I fix things» — and he lets the words hang over me like mist,… Read More ›
I had to watch myself on Skype last night, which was hard. The beard’s gotten so long it gets in the way of my food, I get moustache hairs in my meat which feels barbaric — and unemployed now for… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 