The Long Walk Home

Now that the weather has finally gotten nice, we’re walking to school more often. I put Annika in the stroller, and Katrina either walks or rides her scooter.

It takes about 15 minutes.

About halfway to school, Annika turns around in her stroller and glares at me. “WALK! WALK!” she demands. “Not now,” I reply. “You can walk after we drop Katrina off at school.”

Kisses and hugs, and Katrina runs onto the school playground. “WALK!”

“OK, let’s walk.” I lift Annika out of the stroller, and we walk home.

It takes about an hour.

Come, “walk” with us.

“UP!”

The first “WOCK!” stop. Gravel is like treasure, and our route home provides enough for the greediest of pirates.

See that wall there? The dirt is Annika eye level, perfect for digging through and finding little bugs. And cigarette butts.

“FWOWERS!”

We pass this trash can every single day. And every single day she says “TWASH!” and leans over and looks into it. I know! So exciting! Who knows what will be in it today!

Every so often she takes off running, and I am hard-pressed to keep up with the sudden speed. I aim to keep me or the empty stroller between her and the very busy street to our left. Most of the time I succeed.

  “UP!” If we time it right, we pass by the train crossing just as the morning train comes in. She is fascinated by the gates going up and down. She points and says “UP” whenever we pass this intersection, whether the train’s there or not.

Right in front of her is a beautiful planter with blooming flowers. The gravel is more interesting.

This day she brought two of her purses (BAG! PURR!)with her. So the gravel goes in her purse. And out again. And in. You get the idea.

She hears the “ding-ding-ding” of the train crossing gate behind us.

“Here, Annika, let’s go look at the train…oh. A manhole cover. Well. Train can’t compete with sticking your fingers in the hole of the manhole cover.”

“TWAIN! UP!”

Ooo! Dirt!

“GUCKY! DIWTY!”

“SIT!” OK, I lie. Her “S” often sounds like “SH”. She says “SHIT!” a LOT.

“OK, Annika, let’s go.” “NO! SHIT!”

You think you’re going to make it home in an hour? Yeah, right, Mom.

Checking her inventory. Or putting a leaf in, I can’t tell which.

I wonder if blue walls feel different than other colors of walls. Hmmmm…

“GUCKY! GUCKY! WAH!”

“CAAAAH! AUTO! CAH! AUTO!” (“Auto” is German for car and is pronounced more like “OWTOE”)

“UP! SHTEP!”

“One, two, free, THUMP!” (jump)

“FUHRFEE!”

More gravel. Coolest Walk EVAH.

Who needs pretty scenery when you’ve got gravel to play with?

  And even an interesting place to put it?

And then there’s the weighing station, with a whole new surface to walk on!

“THUMP!”

Ooh, a new place to put rocks!

And…take them out again.

Hmmm, maybe this thing will open today. It didn’t yesterday, or the day before, but maybe today.

The old curb-road up-and-down walking trick. Fun for all ages.

Well, what do you know? More WOCKS!

Can I squeeze through here? I’d really like go over this wall head first, but Mama keeps holding me back.

S’cuse me, must make a call.

Oh, yeah? Really? Hey, I have to go. I see more rocks I must examine. Yeah. Yeah. Ok, bye.

“OPEN!”

Finally at our street. She decides she needs one purse on each arm.

 

More up and down.

 

“HI, YA-YA! Hi, YA-YA! Hi, YA-YA!” (Ya-ya is her rendition of the neighbor boy’s name. Note that Ya-ya was nowhere in sight. She just feels the need to hail the house every time we pass by.)

Also, Ya-ya has WHITE rocks. Must be examined Every Time.

We dropped Katrina off at about 8:40 am. We walk into the house at about 9:45.

“MELMO! MELMO! MELMO!”

Sure, baby. Here, watch Elmo. Mama needs a rest.

Rambling and Rewinding

We walked to school the other day, the girls and I. That is, I walked; Annika rode in her stroller; and Katrina zipped along on her scooter, slowing beside me to talk, and then, with one push, gliding ahead, her red gingham dress flapping at her legs. It’s finally gotten warm here, hot and humid even.

She slowed down as we neared a bed of flowers in front of the train station. “Mom, these plants…the smell of them smells like Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”

I have a bit of a cold, so I didn’t smell much of anything. But I vividly remember a hot summer’s afternoon, a few years after we were married. I was walking home from the bus stop after work, when some combination of plants and fertilizer and heat and humidity drew me back to my grandparents’ house in New Jersey.

Mind you, my grandparents moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania when I was relatively young, and I have a very poor long-term memory. But suddenly I saw the long flagstone walk, punctuated with one or two stairs at a time, that led down to the back door of Nana and Pop-pop’s house. It was surrounded by rhododendron bushes, I believe, and looked like a haven after a long car ride. And I remember the smell of growing things and soil.

What seems a bit quirky to me is that I remember places in much more detail than events. I have very few memories of events in that New Jersey house, but I can tell you the layout of the house and even what some of the furniture looked like.

“Mom,” said Katrina later that afternoon, “I wish I could rewind to when I was three.”

“You mean, you want to be three again?” I asked, a bit worriedly.

“No, I want to rewind like in a movie. And I want to see when I was a baby, and see your grandma and grandpa, and then, even before I was born!” she said. “And then come back to being seven.”

She has seen the pictures of herself as a few-months-old baby, being held by my Pop-pop. And others of her and my Gram. And thanks to my fading memory (and perhaps the extreme exhaustion that marked my experience of Katrina’s first few months), I remember the photographs themselves better than being there and taking them.

 

 

Living in Germany brings my past back to me sometimes, in unexpected ways. My mom’s side of the family is almost exclusively of German ancestry; my dad’s side also has a significant German flavor. I didn’t pay much attention to this, really, living in America. We are all Americans, right?

But in public, here, I catch glimpses of my family. The (ahem) aristocratic noses, strong jaws, long-ish faces. I see my sister’s swingy blonde hair, the way my dad walks, the angular planes of my step-brothers’ cheeks. My aunt, a naturalist and writer, said to me once that she felt like she “found her people” when she visited Germany, and as I see the hardy folk of all ages trekking through the forested parks in the area, I can see why.

And then there’s our neighbor.

Herr A. is an older man who lives with his wife one house over. He owns a bit of land behind our backyard, one part planted with trees, and the other a potato patch. The rest of his yard is separated from our sight by the typical (for Germany) high hedge. But from an upstairs window, I can see his back yard, nearly taken up by a huge vegetable garden.

Gardening runs in our family too, although I seem to have a black thumb. The garden itself reminds me of the one my dad had when we were growing up. The one his dad helped him out with sometimes. And I hear my Gram’s voice, “Pull up your pants, George!” And I see Pap in brown pants and beige-ish collared shirt, and suspenders, maybe? Just the back of him, because there was no way I was getting any closer to garden work than eating fresh tomatoes.

But Herr A. himself? He brings Pop-pop back. His shock of white hair--sometimes hidden by a beat-up hat--his nondescript “slacks” and shirt, his lean but slightly stooped posture, his weathered skin. His face is his own, but from afar, as he plants and hoes, he could be my maternal grandfather.

I was lucky to know my grandparents through my adulthood. One of the many small griefs of our five-year infertility was not having children in time for two of my grandparents to meet them.  

Katrina has a better memory than I do, I think (I’m not sure how she could have a worse one). I wonder what she will remember about her past. When she is my age, what sights and smells and sounds will bring her back to Grandma’s horse barn, to the park below Grammy and Pap’s, to Grandpa’s basement computer room or Grammy’s kitchen? And when or if she visits Germany in adulthood, will she remember the walk to school? Will the cobblestoned roads and sidewalks evoke the vibrations of riding a scooter over them? Will the faces in this by-then foreign land bring her back home?