I finally put the flowers in the compost

A tall vase of chrysanthemums--bright green button mums among fringier-petaled gold, yellow, burgundy, and lavender mums--stood in my living room since the day before my parents left in September. Chrysanthemums remind my family of the October day when Markus and I got married (October 31, 1992). We decorated church, reception, and wedding cake with many colored mums. For a glance back, see the November 3, 2002 entry on Simon's Place. Be sure to click on the wedding photo to open a photo gallery that shows the mum-inspired color scheme in my wedding dress. In 2002, we celebrated ten years. This year we are approaching 22.

I remember the last day of my parents' trip, a Thursday, as a busy one. In the morning, I drove with my mother into Heilbronn, where she purchased a waffle iron as a gift for Miriam's birthday. Along the way, we saw a gorgeous outdoor flower display, and she bought the mums as a gift for us. I arranged them in a vase, remembering the dozens of chrysanthemums I bought back in 1992 to study for color while designing my dress. I even carried them into department stores and held their petals next to bolts of colorful raw silk.

After lunch at our place in Flein, we piled in the car to meet up with Markus' parents in Stuttgart. Then we drove south to the University of Hohenheim for a tour around the Botanical Garden. It was a rainy tour, but we held our umbrellas and kept walking until we reached the end of the garden with Simon's tree. Markus' parents had sponsored the tree in Simon's memory soon after his death. Ten years later, the zelkova serrata (Japanese elm) has suffered some setbacks and lost branches to extreme winter cold. Nonetheless, we found it and looked under the foliage long enough to uncover the sign. It's a spunky little tree. Here's a map of the garden and some photos of our visit.

Botanical Garden in Hohenheim. The purple pin (bottom left) indicates the approximate location of Simon's tree.

To find Simon's tree, you walk south from the Schloß (red pin above). Eventually you pass the lavender labyrinth and continue to an open meadow descending a hillside. At the bottom is a gathering of trees. Simon's is the small one in the middle (below) with touches of orange color.

Simon's tree viewed from the meadow.

Simon's tree

The botanical marker

Four who slogged through the wet meadow to the tree:
Ann Craig, Irmgard Vodosek, Mary Craig
(and Markus Vodosek behind the camera)

Miriam with all four grandparents

Our busy day ended with dinner out at Bella Vista, a restaurant on the top level of a luxury high rise. The view was indeed incredible, even under cloudy skies. A fitting last day for my parents' 12-day trip. The next morning I took them to the airport. Their flight was on September 12th.

And so my brain ticked through things as I snipped the flower stalks today to fit them into the kitchen compost. Just how long had those chrysanthemums lasted? I back-dated from my parents' departure date. The day before, when my mom bought the flowers, was September 11th.

September 11th. How odd. I don't remember thinking this year about the anniversary of 9/11. Not the day of. It was the kind of busy day when I don't listen to the radio, don't glance at a paper, where surely even in Germany the date would have been mentioned. But for me the day passed by.

I guess those flowers lasted about three weeks. I guess one day you notice you haven't thought about an anniversary you'd thought would never lose its power. I guess you can get that busy with your own life.

Harder than you'd think

Getting started in a new place turns out to be harder than I thought. Well, I'm not sure I can characterize my process as being very full of "thought." Mid-May 2010 we decided to move from Utah to Germany. July 28 we vacated our house of seven years. August 25 I arrived in my new hometown of Flein, near Heilbronn. September 13 all our stuff arrived.

Today, October 19 (a Tuesday), I am typing at my actual desk. Sam, the cat, is seated on the desk to my right, atop my journal book. Simon (the other cat) is tucked into a ball on the sofa behind me. We're all three pretty quiet, except for the clatter of my keyboard.

The large tree out back has lost half its red-brown leaves. A second tree, a hairy-looking weeping sort, has skinny finger-like leaves that are turning yellow. Still plenty to come for the rake. Grey skies and a nippy wind. It occurred to me this morning that it's time to turn on the heat in our apartment.

As noted in my post of 28 September, I did indeed return to the nearby vineyards to help with this year's grape harvest. I lost count, but I think I was present for eight days all together. Now I have sore muscles from unpacking and hefting boxes, from raking, and from bending over and snipping at grape vines. Which I can feel while typing. Hence the brevity of today's post.

I imagined when I set this blog up about three weeks ago that I was more or less ready to write on a regular basis. What I misestimated is the impact of upheaval on my ability to keep track of the days as they go by and to find the stillness I need to put words on the page.

Currently reading Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays by George Orwell (collected and edited by George Packer). What a master of the essay form. I'm inspired to return to 1984, which I have not read since high school. And I am old enough to have read it before the actual year arrived. I first encountered Orwell's essays in writing workshops, most memorably at the 2008 Wesleyan Writers Conference in a workshop with Katha Pollit. Orwell's most commonly referenced essays come from his time in India and Burma: "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). Both offer a compelling mix of narrative flow and incisive commentary.

In "The Case for the Open Fire" (8 December 1945), Orwell asserts that, in spite of technological progress in heating systems, society would benefit from keeping the open coal fire. He describes a family near the fire: a necessary closeness to the fire creates closeness among those gathered there. "[T]he survival of the family as an institution may be more dependent on it than we realise" (190).

Then there is the fascination, inexhaustible  to a child, of the fire itself. A fire is never the same for two minutes together, you can look into the red heart of the coals and see caverns or faces or salamanders, according to your imagination: you can even, if your parents will let you, amuse yourself by heating the poker red-hot and bending it between the bars, or sprinkling salt on the flames to turn them green. (190)

 . . . It is quite true that [a fire] is wasteful, messy and the cause of avoidable work: all the same things could be said with equal truth of a baby. . . . (191)

. . . [I]magine the dreariness of spending Christmas evening in sitting . . . round a gilded radiator! (192)

So, here I sit at a desk in Germany with the heat on for the first time. The radiator gives off a smell of burnt dust, one of the many unfamiliar smells to get used to in a new home. This particular smell, like the plentiful rotting apples along the bike paths of Flein, is seasonal.

Unceremonious Beginnings

I have been waiting . . . for what? For a desk to be clear and a light to shine so that I can sit down and begin a chronicle of this new phase of my life. I'm calling it Chapter This. (It isn't easy to find a blog name that hasn't already been taken.)

But the desk is not (yet) clear, and shining lights remain elusive.

My daughter, Miriam, and I arrived in Germany on Wednesday, August 25, 2010. We joined Markus, who had been in (and out) of our new German home since late July. A forty-foot container filled with our material possessions left Salt Lake City, Utah on July 28th to travel from Oakland, California via the Panama Canal to Bremerhaven in northern Germany (this link opens a world map that shows shipping densities, and you can imagine the route if you locate deep red area in the middle of the California coast, look for Panama, and find another deep red area east of the UK). Estimated arrival in Bremerhaven: September 6th.

It's not that I haven't blogged from the midst of chaos before. I have. Back before we even said "blog." In December 2001, Markus and I began Simon's Place, the website that helped us communicate about the illness and eventual death of our son (and Miriam's older brother), Simon. Hospitals. Medical procedures with a four year old (then five year old, six year old). A cross country move from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Salt Lake City. End of life care for a seven year old. Devastating loss. Grief. Looking for new footholds, tiny handholds. Six years have passed since Simon died. He would be an 8th grader now.

Miriam, who turned 11 last week, has started 5th grade at Justinus-Kerner-Gymnasium in Heilbronn. After 7 years on the faculty of the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, Markus took a position at the German Graduate School of Management and Law (GGS), where he is Professor of Strategic Management and Leadership. So far so good in their new endeavors.

I have left a job at the Salt Lake Arts Academy (grades 5-8), where I taught German, choir, and creative writing. Here in Germany I am going to build my writing life. Perhaps I'll find my way back into teaching. For now, I'm butting heads with Miriam, who doesn't really want to learn German from her mother. But I happen to be a pretty good German teacher . . .

And so I need my writing desk. We're getting closer. Our container took another week in transit from Bremerhaven down here to Flein, just south of Heilbronn. It arrived on Monday, September 13. Try fitting the contents of a 2500 square foot house (plus full storage basement and garage) into a 1600 square foot apartment. We discarded like crazy before leaving Utah but brought the bulk of our household here (nothing in storage stateside). As our mover said, more than once, we have a lot of books.

Markus, my live-in electrical engineer, spent the last two weeks preparing for and teaching a 5-day intensive course. He basically disappeared into work right about the time the container arrived. So, it's been two weeks of me unpacking (with help from some kind souls) in a half-lit apartment. Now that Markus is back putting time in at home, lights and switches are going in everywhere, and pretty soon I'll have a working office.

Meanwhile, I am off tomorrow (Thursday) for a day of bringing in the grapes. Flein is in wine country. I've managed to volunteer myself onto a team of folks who enjoy helping a local wine grower with tending and harvesting the crop. Last week, we cut a red grape called Acolon. I'll be back to tell about what happens tomorrow.