This blog is about to experience radio silence for a number of days while my husband and I pack a car with 2 dogs, 2 children, and too many suitcases and motor our way out of the deep South and up to the DC/Baltimore area to catch our plane. It will be a venture worthy of a John Candy and Steve Martin movie. . . Although, in my head, I see it playing out more like a Keystone Cops chase reel: frantic, flustered, hysterically funny but sometimes painful to watch, and all taking place at choppy double-time speed, accompanied by a warbling gin-joint soundtrack. (If you need the visual, it goes something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmpHvOzlxE )
Feel free to fill in the details of this misshapen trip in your own imagination. Once we set up camp on the other end, I’ll send up a smoke signal.
If you are considering house hunting at a distance–a considerable, oceans-apart distance–just stop right now. It is impossible. We’ve spent weeks trying to do the same. And we should have known better. We did this years ago before moving to England, and I found the perfect house. A beautiful, stately, Victorian row house that was huge and elegant. We didn’t put the money down, but we booked an appointment to see it within a day of landing in the UK.
What we saw online looked vaguely like this:
And the angels sang.
What we saw in person looked more like this:
Only smaller.
(The angels broke into a mournful dirge while I wept.)
It was still adorable, but any hopes of getting our four poster bed through the front door were futile.
Nevertheless, we’ve tried to peek at houses online again before this move to Germany. Just to get a feel for what will/won’t be out there. We’ve been told that the housing market is tight where we are moving. We’ve been told, leave furniture at home, the houses are small and there are no closets. We’ve been told, no worries, there are plenty of large, great houses. We’ve been told dogs are no problem. We’ve been told dogs may be a problem. The sky is blue; the sky is orange. Take your pick. It’s truly impossible to do this at a distance.
Nevertheless, we look at online ads.
Here’s what we hope to browse through:
Adorable!
But you wouldn’t believe how many German sites post mostly these photos:
This worries me only slightly less than it baffles me. If the owner is proud of his bidet, I’m happy for him. However, I can’t understand why we are shown so many bathroom photos and so few living room photos, so few exterior photos. Does that famous German orderliness beget a national obsession with bathrooms? I’d rather not think about that. And I’m sure there is a simple, and more appealing, reason for all of these bathroom photos.
My theory: it’s a sign from God that house hunting at a distance is a potty-brained idea. *Sigh.*
So, here’s the plan. We wait until our feet are on the ground in Germany in mid June, and we scramble as fast as we can to find a place. It’s worked for us in the past–here’s hoping the luck holds.
We will soon bid a fond farewell to Alabama and begin waking up to glorious German mornings. So before we begin the tales of our travels in Germany, it’s time to collect a few thoughts on what we’ll miss, and what we will not miss, about Bama:
I will NOT miss the Black Widow spiders. Horrible! And everywhere! Terrifying little beasts. (Can you tell I have spider issues?) They overtook our patio furniture and moved into our mailbox last year when we left for 3 weeks of summer vacation. After that, I took to wearing big, yellow dishwashing gloves each time I’d go to retrieve the mail. I’m sure the neighbors talked–but I don’t care. I was doing my best to keep up the eccentric Southerner image and warding off Black Widow bites at the same time. Seemed like a win-win situation to me. All the same, I can happily live without Black Widows.
I can also live without the summers that continue into the holiday season. No living nativity should include Baby Jesus in a sunhat and swim diapers. Not that Bethlehem is known for its blizzards… but…let’s save that digression for another day. I’m just saying, September really ought to be the outer wall of summer, after which Mother Nature should change out the seasonal scenery for you. Any less than four seasons, and the climate is veering off toward abhorrent. (Any more than four seasons, and it gets pretty weird too.)
And, no, I won’t miss all the giant trucks that never sound like they have mufflers. Which is funny, because they do have mufflers. (Thanks to their monster tires, you can actually look up and see the mufflers looming overhead when they pass. Maybe they are just decorative mufflers. Or maybe they are really extra sound pipes, like a church organ. Clever… but I still don’t get it.)
I WILL miss the BBQ from Dreamland Barbecue. And the banana pudding. Yum! Some of the best BBQ ever–right up there with Stamey’s BBQ and Chandler’s Beef BBQ in North Carolina.
I will definitely miss the neighbors–some native Alabamians, some not. All friendly. All funny. All standing rabidly on one side or the other of the Alabama/Auburn rivalry.
I’ll also miss the way store clerks strike up long conversations with you like they’ve known you all their lives. I’ve a feeling that won’t happen much in Germany. . .and, anyway, it will be a while before my vocabulary isn’t exhausted in a three minute conversation.
Back to things I’m not fond of–I’m not usually a big fan of lists like this: what I love/what I hate about _____. There’s a lot to love about any place. And I’ve never met a place that, no matter how great, didn’t have it’s low points. But, as Melville said, “There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast…Nothing exists in itself.” Life is a study in contrasts, so bring them on! A little sour in the sweet provides the necessary punch.
And punch line. Let’s be honest, it’s those “what I don’t like” lists that provide the laughs. Where would we be without the horrors, the gaffes, the Stinking Bishop amongst the cheeses? But that, my friends, is a tale for the morrow. See you then!
Saying goodbye to our home, our family, our continent—it’s been tough. Right, right, we’ve been really excited about moving to Germany–and it’s great to be here having adventures. GREAT. Still, these things are bittersweet: bitter and sweet, not one or the other. My daughter’s heart is still breaking because she misses her friends back home. My son aches for a familiar friend to skateboard with in front of our house. And I’m still mourning the hope of having Thanksgiving with family, of playing golf with my gang, of walking back into my classroom for fall semester at AUM. The list goes on for each of us.
But these lists aren’t ours alone, and they don’t apply only to us itinerant types. You can live in the same state all your life and still experience moments of overwhelming loss: when you walk into a room full of laughing relatives and expect to see your uncle, the consummate storyteller, sitting in the center of the laughter (but he passed away last year and his seat is empty); when you step out into a balmy southern evening and hear the cicadas and tree frogs and have an overwhelming sense that you’ve just stepped out of your grandmother’s house, headed to the backyard with a glass of sweet tea in hand (but she passed away 29 years ago); or even when a Violent Femmes song at high decibel puts you right back into a moshpit of a party with your high school and college friends (but you are driving up I-85 with your kids in the back of a station wagon). Memory is a sticky substance–thank God. And I think that, as much as it sticks to us, we stick to it also.
I’ve been mulling this over all morning after being hit by the sting of a lost “momento” of my life story. It goes like this: Yesterday, we picked up our car from a port on the North Sea. We’d shipped it from the States about two months ago. (Despite paying a hefty–h-e-f-t-y– sum to send it over the Atlantic and through customs, it seems that the shipper inflated a small raft underneath the chassis and paddled it over the ocean himself. This is the only explanation I can offer for the insane timeline. But back to my story–) I had the car inspected before getting German plates put on this morning, and it passed with the stipulation that I scrape the dealer’s decal, indicating a city in North Carolina, off of the back of the car. They had their reasons–logical enough, if uninspiring–but my heart sank a little as I scraped away.
I am a Carolina girl. I may look like a vagabond to you, with a crazy long list of places I’ve called home in recent years: Chicago, DC, Connecticut, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, England, Turkey, Germany. Each of those places has left an indelible mark. I wouldn’t want to lose any of them, but especially not my roots in North Carolina.
However, I lose a little bit of each of them in unexpected moments–like bits of produce that spill from my cart as I bump along a country road, I shed bits here and there–and I hate that. So this morning, I obediently scraped the North Carolina decal from the back hatch of my wagon, mourning that badge of “who I am” that I’d been carrying around for over a decade. I am still a Carolina girl, but I’m no longer emblazoned on the highway–that shouldn’t sting much, but it does. Like everyone I’ve ever known, I like to hold tight to who I am and what (and whom) I’ve loved. And the artifacts of life are dear to me for that reason. But like everyone I’ve ever known, I find life prying little bits of this away from me.
As a postscript, I offer up the words of Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful poem about loss–in all of its incarnations, big and small. She said it so much better than I can, so I’ll let her words stand:
My material things don’t equate my life–let me just say that up front.
And yet.
I’m a magpie. I collect threads and scraps as I move along, and they pad my nest. No, that’s not exactly it. They become the fabric of my nest. The baubles I collect as I keep wandering represent my life. And it’s hard to watch them all be packed up, some to load onto a slow boat to Germany and some to sit in storage for a couple of years. So many of my things feel like old friends, like artifacts of adventurous times, not like run of the mill stuff at all.
And, yes, in the interest of full disclosure, I have too much “stuff” too. I’m not proud that among the boxes being packed up in my house there are “As Seen on TV” products, old DVD’s and VHS tapes of bad sitcoms, some dog figurines…well, it just gets ugly. But let’s focus on the beauty here:
There’s the portrait of Teak, the first dog my husband and I owned–so beautiful and so smart. He was the beginning of a small menagerie of children, dogs, and goldfish who share our life.
There’s the old dollhouse from England, bought at auction. It’s a Tudor, half-timber design, handmade, and sporting a “Toy Town Antiques” sign over the door and a little antique shop in the front room, visible through the window.
There’s the 300 year old walnut chest that may or may not house a ghost. (We call her Emily.)
The church pew from the Ripon Cathedral in our old hometown of Ripon, England (legitimately bought, not carried out of the cathedral–thanks for asking). It is quite beautiful, but impossible to look at without imagining the people who were there before you. Brides and widows. Carolers and clerics. Young, old, rich, poor, inspired, and downtrodden. A microcosm of life on one short bench.
There’s the old pocket Bible from WWII that bears King George’s stamp and message to soldiers in the front cover, and is partially hollowed out in the middle so the owner could hold cigarettes or pass notes. It came from the estate of a former British soldier; he was a POW in the Pacific theater.
The Turkish carpet we bought from a man affectionately (?) known as “the one-armed bandit” in Kizkalesi, Turkiye. He lived in a coastal town not too far from where we lived and knew our car the minute we drove into town for the weekend. He’d flag us down, bring us into his home, close the curtains, and then pull out his stash of carpets, jewelry, and antiquities for sale. All a little shady, but in a seductively high intrigue way. We felt like James Bond in Istanbul, wheeling and dealing. And, yes, he had just one arm. (No doubt, there’s an interesting back story there.)
The list goes on. And on. And on.
Each item is its own story–some love stories, some comedies, some tragedies, some mysteries. Inanimate objects? No way.
Some of it is just stuff. But so much of it runs deeper than that. The artifacts of a life lived and loved. Who could possibly fit that into a box?
It will be a venture worthy of a John Candy and Steve Martin movie. . . Although, in my head, I see it playing out more like a Keystone Cops chase reel: frantic, flustered, hysterically funny but sometimes painful to watch, and all taking place at choppy double-time speed, accompanied by a warbling gin-joint soundtrack. (If you need the visual, it goes something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmpHvOzlxE )
Travels and Tomes: One Expat's Amblings and Ramblings 