Change

I haven't been on here in a few days, because I've been processing new information.

I don't do change well. I like for things to stay the same. That comforts me.

I wasn't going to blog about this, but changed my mind. (For a person who doesn't enjoy change, I change my mind often. But that's just because I'm flighty.)

My grandparent's house in Germany sold a couple weeks ago. It made perfect sense for Mom to sell it. She re-married this past summer and now lives in her husband's home. My Opa (that's the German word for Grandpa) died several years ago. And my Oma (Grandma) has been in a nursing home for the last couple years, so the house was empty. It was aging and needing some pretty extensive, and expensive, repairs. It was becoming difficult for mom to maintain, so selling it was the best option.

But it still stinks.

From the time I was born until my dad retired from the Air Force when I was 19, I lived six different places. Kansas, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Germany and Oklahoma. The only thing constant during those years, besides my immediate family, was that my mom's parents lived in the same house in Culmitz, Germany, and that my dad's parents lived in first one house and then another, within spitting distance of the first, in Cookeville, Tennessee.

And there is nothing finer than your grandparents' homes.

I spent a summer with my Oma and Opa between 6th and 7th grade. At that time it was great simply because I got to have time away from my brothers. (Now, I'd like to be closer to them both!) My grandparents still worked then, so I was home alone during the day. But I'd walk to the bus stop down the road to meet them when the van from their company dropped them off at the end of the work day. They never had a car, and I'm not sure if they even had driver's licenses.

I was never bored at their home. I would read... a lot. Or go out to the area where my Opa kept the rabbits he raised, and I'd feed them. If there were babies, I'd reach in the cubbie and pull one away from the nervous Mamma Bunny, who would stomp her back leg to warn me of her ire. I'd then play with the baby on a bunch of straw on the floor. I got bit a few times by Mamma Bunny, too, but that never stopped me.

Sometimes I'd walk in the woods behind their house. Or play in the creek that runs behind the garage and back yard.

The creek winds all the way through the village, and my brothers and I would toss leaves or flowers in the water behind Oma and Opa's house and then run like the dickens down the street, to the main road of the village and arrive at the bridge, out of breath, just in time to see our floating foliage pass underneath. Oh, the agony of defeat if we arrived too late!

I helped pick fresh strawberries out of my grandparent's garden. And from that garden I'd snip off pieces of whatever spice my Oma wanted to put in the soup that day. There are spices to this day that I know only by their German names.

I buried a pet hamster in the flower garden behind their house, too. His name was Gus. I named him by using the first letter from the names of each boy I had a crush on that year... Grant, Ulrich (a German boy from the village we lived in) and Steve. Along that vein, I could just as aptly have named him Fickle.

On a good day, in the back yard, if we rolled over the right rock, my brothers and I would find several Ohrenhiller, or ear wig bugs.



We'd poke them with sticks just to watch them move their pinchers. We might have stopped that torture if we'd ever gotten pinched like we deserved, but we were pretty good at it, so we didn't.

My Oma ALWAYS had flowers in the flower bed in the front of the house by the stairs, usually petunias.

The homes in Germany are built to house several generations of a family. Grandparents would live on one floor while their kid's family lived on another. It's not like this as much anymore, because their society is almost as mobile as ours is, and the younger generation doesn't want to live in little villages. Anyway, when you rang the doorbell at my grandparent's house, on each level was a button that you could push that would allow the door to be pushed open... without you having to walk down the stairs to let the visitor in. To us kids, that was just flat-out cool.

If we were at Oma and Opa's house at the right time of year, they'd take us Schwamma hunting. Mushrooms. Opa taught us the difference between poisonous ones and those that were safe to eat. If part of the mushroom had worms in it, it was safe. And did you know that if you see deer poop, mushrooms are usually not far away? It's true.

After gathering bags of mushrooms, we'd take them home, and we were taught how to clean them. One type of mushroom was brown on top and underneath the top was this yellowish, spongey stuff that needed to be discarded... but it was fun to squish with your fingers. Another type just needed the top layer peeled off.

Once they were cleaned, Opa or Oma would cook them, usually with scrambled eggs or a sauce. And we ate them. And lived to tell about it.

We always took walks. For hours sometimes. Up hills, across train tracks, between fields (on the sides, though, because it's not nice to walk through a farmer's fields and damage his crop).

Sometimes we'd take buckets and alongside the railroad tracks we'd stop and pick wild blueberries. I don't remember what Oma made with them once we got home, but I do recall eating a bunch of them while we were in the picking process.

Here's another one of my favorite things about their home. In the mornings, right as your consciousness started to alert itself to the fact that sun was streaming into the windows, you'd hear the train whistle as it cruised along those very tracks that we'd walked upon and where we'd picked blueberries. I love the sound of a train whistle!

My brothers, who shared most of these experiences with me, may have other memories to add. Like the time Chris barrelled down the side street from our grandparent's house on his bike and drove straight into a parked Mercedes. I can't remember how many stitches he got from the wound on his leg, but I bet he can. Terry was engineer extraordinaire for all the countless forts we built in the woods. He picked the sturdiest pine branches and dug the biggest patches of moss for the roof. And we felt like kings when we crawled into the dark, musty-smelling spaces after hours of construction work.

And none of us will ever forget what it's like to have a bare leg brush up against a leaf of Brennessel, or Stinging Nettle. Ooo-chee-wah-wah, as my kids would say.

Bruce gets tired of me glamorizing Germany. And truth be told, the last time we visited (our first trip with the kids) a few years ago, things had changed. The bakery in the village was on its last leg, and has since closed. That's a shame of epic proportions. I know this because I've eaten a lot of baked goods from that place, and they couldn't be beaten.

The country was dirtier than I remembered, too. More trash on the side of the roads, more grafitti on bridge underpasses.

But I don't think our kids will remember those things. They'll think about taking train trips, walking around castle relics, eating authentic German bratwurst and going to the Italian Eis store where we ate lots of ice cream.

This week, I erased the address of my grandparent's house out of my address book. And I just now deleted the phone number off our phone's memory, even though it's been disconnected for a couple years now.

But that doesn't matter. The memories will always be precious to me.

And because I must end on a positive note, I'll include my favorite pictures from our trip with the kids.

The first one is of mom, me and the kids walking up the hill behind my grandparent's house, towards the woods. My grandparent's house is the gray one in the very middle. You can only see the top floor, where the attic is.



The church in the village meets only every other Sunday, and before services start, they ring a bell that can be heard throughout the village. The bell is up inside this wooden, triangular structure that my brothers and I used to stand under. And so I had to do the same with our kids.



We have probably 20 pictures very much like the one below. We ate a LOT of ice cream while we were there.



And this next trio, I like to title, "Walking on the Edge: A Lesson Learned".







He was soaked, and our train was due in about 15 minutes. The train depot was on the edge of town, so I ran like a crazy woman back into town, went to a children's clothing store we'd passed on our walk through the village, quickly grabbed a matching pair of shorts and t-shirt in what I hoped was at least close to the correct size, shelled out far more Euros than I'd like to have paid, and ran back. I'm pretty sure I heard modified Mighty Mouse music playing in the back ground.

"Here she comes to save the day!"

And Spencer wore a new outfit on the train ride back, with squishy socks and shoes and no underwear, because they, too, were soaked but I had no time to shop for undies.