In just one week, I will be hosting a birthday party for myself in my garden. We will make a campfire, cook wurst and marshmallow, and have a good time. I plan to invite my host family and close friends in the area. Most importantly, Miriam will be arriving!!! My long-lost and loved mod-mate. A couple other old friends from Bethel might make it, too, if possible. The party will be bittersweet, as I will also be saying good-bye to my best friends in Germany, Anna and Nanna. They are returning to England and Finland, and my life here will be so strange and empty without them. I have a feeling I´ll fill my time with more bike-riding, gardening, and hopefully painting. It is possible that I´ll make new friends, but it is also getting a bit too late in the year to make any connections as solid as ours. I am so thankful that they´re leaving as the weather begins to warm, though. It will make the transition easier, as I´ll have some outdoor activities with which to occupy my time. I would have been severely depressed to find myself alone and without a social life during the dark months of January or February.
Following the garden house party, Miriam will stay with me for a couple days. I am so excited to play "tour-guide" and show her my local haunts, beloved nooks and countrysides. It is also strangely necessary for me to have someone from back home witness me living here. I´m not sure why, but I need this. Maybe just to prove that I can survive somewhere outside Kansas, get around, speak a new language, be responsible, and be happy. I´m not really sure.
Monday, April 6 (day after my birthday) begins my Easter holiday, and Miriam and I will depart from Lübeck for Ireland! We will only be able to stay one week, but I cannot contain my excitement. Going to Ireland has been a dream of mine for so long, and it will be so incredible to spend it with such a good friend. We really need to start making some tentative plans, but don´t want the trip to be too stressful with an overloaded itinerary. Public transportation in Ireland isn´t the best, so we might be renting a car instead of worrying ourselves with confusing and limited bus schedules. This makes sense, but I´ll admit that driving on the left side of the road makes me nervous... oh well. It will be good for us, right? We´re also both REALLY limited with our budgets, so we´re going to do couch-surfing (free!!) instead of booking hostels or hotels. At first this made me a bit uncomfortable, but I´m a member now of a couch surfing online network, and it is very safe. You can choose to stay with fun, young students in a flat, families of all sorts, old couples in their cozy homes - anyone! It also enhances the traveling experience, as the hosts love meeting new people and are happy to give local insight - even provide meals! I think this decision is going to reward us in several unexpected and fulfilling ways! It will be nice to feel like we´ve made some connections everywhere we visit, as well.
Just one week. My life will be quite different in a week.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
The dirt is so black it is purple.
The sun has been brilliantly shining for two days now. While the temperature rarely rises above 5-8°C (about 40-45°F), the return of my bright yellow friend is a welcome arrival. It has also started to linger until about 6:30 before setting. Compared to 3:30 at the peak of winter, this makes a phenomenal difference in how I plan my days. I sort of went into hibernation during the months of November through March. I often would nap after sending the children to school, as it was still dark until about nine. In fact, I often picked up the children from sport or playdates in the dark if it was after 4:00. It never felt right, but I adapted. It felt as if my day was over when I returned to the garden house in the afternoon, so I would sit around on the computer, read books, and drink lots of tea. Even with a morning nap, my bedtime was often 9:00.
Things are changing now. I have sometimes been rising before my alarm, and haven´t had a morning nap in two weeks now. I linger at morning markets, take my bike instead of car (even with my wobbly basket and impossibly long grocery lists), and have even caught myself making little "surprises" for the children when I tidy the house, instead of just going through the routine as quickly as possible. With the improvement of my language skills, I am starting to enjoy talking to the parents at Forest Kindergarten when I pick up Emmi and her friend Tivon. It helps that we are no longer blasted by icy wind and ice. Yesterday Paul Luis and I had an intense one-on-one soccer match in the back yard as Emmi voluntarily pulled weeds in the garden. Earlier we had been playing and found some little strawberry plants struggling under overgrown grasses and vines. It immediately became Emmi´s mission to "save" them, and I couldn´t have been prouder of her. She also spent about 30 minutes cuddling a "sweet baby slug" she found on a rock. I didn´t tell her that in a couple months I will be starting a routine slug and snail slaughter every night. I don´t look forward to this, but Claudia and Jutta have told me that the only way to have a successful garden here is if one goes out with a flashlight every evening and plucks all the snails and slugs off the vegetable plants. Jutta recommends using a blade or boiling water, while Claudia prefers to have no garden at all. The one time she tried, she would carry large buckets of slugs out into the country every night to release them. There was only enough energy to do this for a couple weeks, and then she surrendered her garden to the forces of nature. Of course, with Claudia being an environmental toxicologist, using pesticides is not an option - which I am more than okay with. I think I can do this, though. I am mildly morally opposed to the idea of killing so many slugs and snails, but like most things I am sure I will get used to it. There is definitely no risk of endangering the species, and I think it is very important to grow food for myself if I can. I planted starters of lettuce mix, tomatoes, and basil, which are now sitting in pots on my garden house windowsills. It still freezes at night, so I think it is too early to put them in the ground. Jutta said I can go ahead and plant carrots, radishes, zucchini, and peas, though, which I might do sometime this week. It is so satisfying to have a new project along with this new season, even if I don´t get to harvest everything before the end of July. I hope I can stay motivated enough to keep everything alive. Maybe I can recruit help from the children. I hope that when the weather warms up we can set up our easels outside and practice some "impressionistic" style painting. Is that dorky? Maybe we can even find some berets...
Yesterday I had a very satisfying bike ride after work. It was indescribably refreshing to breathe air with "life" in it, which basically smelled like manure, dirt, and moss. I took some new paths which I found around the moor. I stopped several times to just sit and watch the dramatic angles of late light against the water, grasses, and white tree bark. I miss taking time to do those things. It has been a few months now since I´ve gone out to the moor. It feels so strange in this part of the country where we have so many lush green fields and forests. It as if someone has taken a little chunk of earth from another land and transplanted it to the heart of Schleswig-Holstein. I am always surprised as I move from familiar fields to forests, and suddenly the grasses become white and brown and gold, the trees black and white. Even the wildlife changes. I start to hear clicks, hums, and chirps of unknown water-bugs and water-birds instead of familiar doves, blackbirds, and magpies. The texture of the path is also something to get used to. It isn´t spongy or squishy, but somehow it "bounces" or "bends" a little as I step and I feel lighter. Maybe I´m imagining things, but I think my steps even sound different. I love the isolation I can experience at the moor. Most of my bike paths around Bordesholm, even the "nature" routes through the woods and lake, are met by dozens of joggers, nordic-walkers, and bikers. I realize I am one of them, and it feels too crowded. There are few open spaces in Germany, and with all the nearby trains and autobahn, it is definitely never quiet. But at the moor I can breathe. Maybe the colors of the tall-grasses remind me of Kansas prairies. If I close my eyes long enough, I can pretend there is a hot breeze and I hear the comforting lullaby of crickets and bull frogs.
Things are changing now. I have sometimes been rising before my alarm, and haven´t had a morning nap in two weeks now. I linger at morning markets, take my bike instead of car (even with my wobbly basket and impossibly long grocery lists), and have even caught myself making little "surprises" for the children when I tidy the house, instead of just going through the routine as quickly as possible. With the improvement of my language skills, I am starting to enjoy talking to the parents at Forest Kindergarten when I pick up Emmi and her friend Tivon. It helps that we are no longer blasted by icy wind and ice. Yesterday Paul Luis and I had an intense one-on-one soccer match in the back yard as Emmi voluntarily pulled weeds in the garden. Earlier we had been playing and found some little strawberry plants struggling under overgrown grasses and vines. It immediately became Emmi´s mission to "save" them, and I couldn´t have been prouder of her. She also spent about 30 minutes cuddling a "sweet baby slug" she found on a rock. I didn´t tell her that in a couple months I will be starting a routine slug and snail slaughter every night. I don´t look forward to this, but Claudia and Jutta have told me that the only way to have a successful garden here is if one goes out with a flashlight every evening and plucks all the snails and slugs off the vegetable plants. Jutta recommends using a blade or boiling water, while Claudia prefers to have no garden at all. The one time she tried, she would carry large buckets of slugs out into the country every night to release them. There was only enough energy to do this for a couple weeks, and then she surrendered her garden to the forces of nature. Of course, with Claudia being an environmental toxicologist, using pesticides is not an option - which I am more than okay with. I think I can do this, though. I am mildly morally opposed to the idea of killing so many slugs and snails, but like most things I am sure I will get used to it. There is definitely no risk of endangering the species, and I think it is very important to grow food for myself if I can. I planted starters of lettuce mix, tomatoes, and basil, which are now sitting in pots on my garden house windowsills. It still freezes at night, so I think it is too early to put them in the ground. Jutta said I can go ahead and plant carrots, radishes, zucchini, and peas, though, which I might do sometime this week. It is so satisfying to have a new project along with this new season, even if I don´t get to harvest everything before the end of July. I hope I can stay motivated enough to keep everything alive. Maybe I can recruit help from the children. I hope that when the weather warms up we can set up our easels outside and practice some "impressionistic" style painting. Is that dorky? Maybe we can even find some berets...
Yesterday I had a very satisfying bike ride after work. It was indescribably refreshing to breathe air with "life" in it, which basically smelled like manure, dirt, and moss. I took some new paths which I found around the moor. I stopped several times to just sit and watch the dramatic angles of late light against the water, grasses, and white tree bark. I miss taking time to do those things. It has been a few months now since I´ve gone out to the moor. It feels so strange in this part of the country where we have so many lush green fields and forests. It as if someone has taken a little chunk of earth from another land and transplanted it to the heart of Schleswig-Holstein. I am always surprised as I move from familiar fields to forests, and suddenly the grasses become white and brown and gold, the trees black and white. Even the wildlife changes. I start to hear clicks, hums, and chirps of unknown water-bugs and water-birds instead of familiar doves, blackbirds, and magpies. The texture of the path is also something to get used to. It isn´t spongy or squishy, but somehow it "bounces" or "bends" a little as I step and I feel lighter. Maybe I´m imagining things, but I think my steps even sound different. I love the isolation I can experience at the moor. Most of my bike paths around Bordesholm, even the "nature" routes through the woods and lake, are met by dozens of joggers, nordic-walkers, and bikers. I realize I am one of them, and it feels too crowded. There are few open spaces in Germany, and with all the nearby trains and autobahn, it is definitely never quiet. But at the moor I can breathe. Maybe the colors of the tall-grasses remind me of Kansas prairies. If I close my eyes long enough, I can pretend there is a hot breeze and I hear the comforting lullaby of crickets and bull frogs.
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