Family News

AUTUMN - OCTOBER 2004

                                                                              
                                                                              
Sunflowers are such happy little folk.

Autumn could be in the running for my favorite season if it didn’t mean winter was fast approaching. Growing up in the deep South we really only had two seasons, summer, which lasted anywhere from six to eight months, and the rest of the year – pre-summer and post-summer and what we called winter. I don’t remember it ever snowing although we did have icy roads once in a while. I remember this clearly because if there was a millimeter of ice on the roads the schools closed down. They also closed down for hurricanes and I can still feel the excitement of approaching storms. Of course it was a mixed blessing to be out of school, because every day was made up for at the end of the school year in the heat of summer. But that never mattered at the time and we rejoiced in our free day.

                                                                              
This is the view from Lee's kitchen window to the apple orchard next door.
                                                                              
                                                                              
When I came to Germany and heard that here the schools close early when it gets too hot I couldn’t believe it. The rule was something like 25° C at ten o’clock which naturally didn’t happen very often in the many years I spent teaching, but the children’s excitement was the same as ours at the prospect of time off. I enjoyed telling them that I went to school where there was no such thing as “heat-free” and it was often 35 - 40° in the afternoons in May and September. (There was no school June, July and August and it was often too hot to play outdoors.) And no, there was NO air-conditioning in the schools then. It’s sort of like the parallel to the stories some people like to tell of walking to school barefoot in five-foot deep snow. (Although I have to add here that I’m really not exaggerating. I can still feel the misery of sitting through classes in unbearable heat.)

                                                                                                               
                                                                                                               
                                                                                                               
Lee's plum tree - lots of potential plum cakes!

                                                                                                               
                                                                                                               
The seasons are much more distinct here and are more or less the same length, although winter seems longer. Although I hated the summer heat when I was growing up, especially the hot nights, I am also not a fan of winter. In northern Germany where we lived for many years, winter is a dismal affair, damp and wet and with cold winds off of the North Sea. And dark! We were so far north that the days faded away at around four in the afternoon in December. The climate is much better where we live now. The winters are shorter and spring and autumn are longer. We also don’t have to deal with the cold fronts that like clockwork sweep down across northern Germany, often bringing a mixture of rain and snow that’s no fun at all. (All this doesn’t mean I don’t miss northern Germany and I still feel like I’m “coming home” when I go to visit there.)

                                                                              
                                                                              
The Main River, not far from our house


It’s a truism that as we grow older time seems to fly by faster and that’s of course true of the seasons too. There’s not much we can do about it, but I’ve found that keeping a record of events demonstrates in retrospect that time hasn’t flown by as fast as I might think. I have only had this website since June and not everything that happened is recorded here, but when I look back over this year I see how nicely long it has been and it’s not even over yet. Now I wish I had started doing this a lot sooner. How nice it would be to have a record of the past to stretch out our lives. Luckily we do have Frank’s Christmas letters and one day soon I want to gather them all together and read through them to be reminded of the richness of our past.

                                                                              
Again, Lee's house. Last year the grapes were so sweet she made jelly.

                                                                              
And so it is with the seasons. I think it’s helpful to be more aware of them and to actively look for the signs of change. To examine something closely helps to slow the march of time and increase the enjoyment of the moment. It reminds me of a phenomenon that I have observed when we are on vacation. The first three or four days seem to pass at a slower speed than normal. Impressions are new and take time to process. Then as a routine develops life speeds up again and before you know it the vacation is over. Maybe the solution to all this is to take a lot of shorter vacations. Not always practical or possible though.

                                                                              
                                                                              
Our favorite walk
                                                                              
We are leaving for New England on Saturday along with Jenny and Ulf. My parents are meeting us there. I don’t really want to shorten our vacation to four days so I will use the other method that is open to me and document our stay. I will have lots of help from Daddy and Jenny since they both have digital cameras and like to use them. I’ll have lots and lots of pictures to choose from when I’m back and can make use of the first days of winter to write all about it. And lucky you will get to read it.

                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                             
The ones just out of reach are always the sweetest.

A WALK ALONG THE MAIN RIVER JULY 19, 2004

Frank and I have a favorite walk that we try to take as often as possible.  The Main (pronounced "mine" in German) River is only a few hundred meters from our house and it continues on for about three kilometers before it merges with the Rhine.  It offers a lovely path to walk along.  Frank likes to tell all our American visitors that they are now "in the main stream".  We do these walks in the evenings when Frank comes home from the office -  weather permitting.  Mary Ellen visited us the weekend before last and we took the walk with her.  At almost the furthest point from our house it started to rain.  Luckily it was a fairly light rain and not the downpour Frank and I experienced on Saturday evening on our bikes.  Anyway we made it home without melting, but the prettiest walk is ruined when it rains.

Another problem on these walks is that there is a certain temperature and time of evening when huge swarms of bugs come out to play.  It's usually just before dark and on really warm evenings.   This hasn't been as much of a problem this year since we've only had a few really hot days. but sometimes it's a challenge to breathe without inhaling these tiny creatures and I refuse to open my mouth to talk when they might invade me.  Frank needs to come home earlier!

There are usually quite a few ships or barges on the river, some from as far away as northern Holland or Switzerland, transporting things like coal or iron scrap.  Once in a while there will be a passenger ship.  One was docked recently for the evening and we asked them where they were from.  They were from Alzey (about 70 km from here) and they had chartered the boat for a week to celebrate someone's birthday.  There were six couples on board and it sounded like they were having a really good time.

There are some locks just where we start our walk, where the boats are lifted up a few meters by filling the locks with water.  It seems like a long process and I have no idea how many there are between the North Sea and Switzerland.  They always make me think of the "Schiffshebe- werk" or ship's elevator (my translation) in Scharnebeck in Northern Germany, where the ships are raised really high, or lowered, as the case may be.  (I have no idea how many meters, and I think it's the largest in the world, or is it just Europe?  I must have passed it hundreds of times - it was about half way between my house and Mary Ellen's - and I took school classes on boat trips to experience it several times.

The same walk all the time gets a little old and we do have a few other paths through our village, but the river is definitely the nicest.  To combat boredom and when we've run out of things to talk about we listen to audio CDs.  I gave Frank Hillary Clinton's autobiography for Christmas, which she reads herself, and which we have been listening to lately.  She has a pleasant voice and reads well and it's interesting to get her take on events that we lived through too, albeit mostly on TV and not in person like her.  I think there are six CDs and we are about half way through now.  And no, I don't think we'll get Bill's CDs.  I don't think I could listen to his voice for that long, although I would be interested in hearing his view of events.  (The book is too long for me to get into right now.)

When our girls were small they were practically addicted to cassettes and we had what seemed like hundreds of them for them to listen to.  They were definitely life savers on long car trips, especially when they each had their own recorder (with earphones of course).  Frank discovered a series of cassettes about the lives of different composers and their music, which were excellently done and interesting even for adults - at least adults like me who know very little about music.  I don't know what happened to all those cassettes, we don't have them any more, but Frank recently bought a CD about the life and times of Dvorjak, which although produced for adults reminded me very much of those cassettes from long ago.  We've also been listening to that on our walks and it offers a very good balance of text and music.  I only wish I could remember everything I hear on it.

On our way home we pass a lot of garden houses on the left.  These are parcels of land that are rented out to people who want to do some  gardening.  Originally they were for factory workers who otherwise had no access to farmable land.  Today anyone can have one, although the waiting list is usually long.  Each parcel has a little garden house on it and the garden is full of vegetables or flowers.  Our neighbor has two parcels and keeps us in rhubarb in the spring, tomatoes and zucchini in the summer and pumpkins in the fall.  The first time my father came to Germany I picked him and Lanie up at the Frankfurt airport and we took a train to Lueneburg.  From the train you could see hundreds of these gardens with houses on them and my father remarked that he didn't know that Germany had so many slums.

At about the furthest point there is a large playground that the boys like to visit when they are here.  Now that they can both ride bikes it's no problem to take them there.  It was a long walk for little legs.  The turn back point is at the bridge that crosses the Main and our way back is along the dike.  This is the dike that keeps us dry when flooding occurs and it's an amazing sight to see all of the land beyond the dike including the playground under water.  There's some flooding almost every year, but there was some severe flooding two years ago when the water was almost to the top of the dike.  Scary!!

JOHANNISNACHT June 28, 2004

                                                                                                                                             

This past weekend there was a big town festival, and I do mean big.  In fact it was estimated that over a half a million people would come.  I don't know how they count things like that, but it certainly covered the whole town from the banks of the Rhine through town to the Grosse Bleiche where an open-air concert took place at some time (which we of course avoided).

                                                      

We rode our bikes as usual.  This is another picture of the railroad bridge that we use to cross the Rhine.  No, that's not us.  Sweet though, isn't it?

The first indication that something was going on was the river bank.  Usually on an early Sunday evening the area would be full of people picnicking, playing ball, grilling, just enjoying themselves.  It was almost empty.  One day it would be fun to bring the boys here for a picnic.

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                             

This is the street we rode along to get to the Old Town.  There are lots of good places to eat in this part of town.

                                             

                                             

                                          

Off to the right there is a small street known as Nose Alley, probably because it curves around towards the cathedral rather like the shape of a nose.  It looks quiet, but I had to wait a while to catch it empty.  That's the cathedral in the background.

                                           

We parked our bikes because it was too crowded to take them with us and took a stroll through Kirschgarten.  There are probably a million postcards of this square.

                                             

We passed one of my favorite shops, which only sells high quality kitchen utensils.  The owner is very friendly and helpful.

                                             

                                             

                                             

We continued down the Augustiner Strasse, which is almost always full of people, but now it was full of booths and picnic tables too.  Two of our favorite places to eat are in this street.

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                             

We reached the Leichhof, which is just behind the cathedral.

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                             

Here we're on our way to the market place.  You can always recognize Frank by his baseball cap.

   

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                            

In front of the theater stood this lovely carousel.  I've never seen a two-story carousel before.  You can see the UFO in the background that was recently built on top of the theater.

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                             

There were lots of rides and things like this gigantic slide.  Max and Alex would love this!

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                            

This is a view of the cathedral from the front of the theater.  It sort of looks like it's floating above the square.

                                             

                                             

There were thousands of choices of things to eat and drink but we weren't really hungry.  We did want a treat though and spent some time looking.  Of course Frank loves anything with ginger in it, but the line was too long.

                                             

                                             

                                             

                                             

In the end this was what we chose.  Yummmmmmmm!!!

My Garden

Here are some pictures of our garden.  This is a wonderful way of showing off our flowers since you cannot all be here when they are in bloom and I can crop the pictures to exclude any ugly little (or big) patches of weeds.  This picture was taken in May when the irises were in bloom.  I fell in love with irises when we took a trip to Provencewith Jenny and Linda a number of years ago.  They grow there wild along the sides of the roads and are just beautiful.  I remembered we had some irises when we lived in Adendorf and they thrived with almost no care and attention - my kind of flower.  Too bad they don't bloom all summer.

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These are sweet peas (Wicken) that I planted too late last year so that they never bloomed.  I also didn't clear them out at the end of the summer as I had planned.  I just never got around to it.  I didn't think they would bloom this year but aren't they pretty?  And they smell so sweet.  My neighbor says they will come back every year unless we have a very hard frost.  Yeah, more easy flowers.

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This is what the flower boxes on the terasse look like at the moment.  They haven't been growing long so they are still a little small.

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This is a close up taken today, June 16th.

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I love these flowers because they are such a beautiful blue and they come back every year and spread a little more.  I don't even remember what they are called.

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These are some flowers that Mary Ellen gave me several years ago.  They're called California

poppies and seed themselves out so that they pop up in unexpected places, especially where there is a lot of sun.