Ingrid and Antje
First day of summer–and although it is still cool-ish here, we woke up to blue skies today. After breakfast, we walked down to the nearest supermarket and the nearby bakery for some lunch ingredients, and then the putzed around in our computers for part of the morning. My friend Ingrid, from our high-school days, who lives in faraway Aachen but whose parents live only an hour from here, stopped by on her way home from a weekend visit with her folks (she took an extra day off to come see us!). We sat in the garden for a while and then had a lovely dinner with salad, bread, and some lovely German sausages–not to mention the very best dessert my mom makes, a fruit tiramisu with layers of raspberries, cantuccini biscuits, and mascarpone/whipped cream mix that is out of this world good. We then took a walk around the lake, catching up on two years of family news on both ends, and had coffee with my mom. Ingrid left around 4 pm to make her way back home (at least a three hour drive, which is never trivial on German freeways), and I finally got my ducks in a row and started working on sorting things in my mom’s attic that are mine. Since she will be moving, she really would like to sort out what she can throw out and what I can take home with me–but this is harder than I thought. I didn’t have trouble sorting the few books that I still had to make decisions about. But among the files of my high school and student days, there were many pages of handwritten and typed notes from pre-computer days that I am having a hard time shedding, even if they are about topics I will not ever return to, like Middle High German or transformational grammar. Between the many hours of work and thinking time that these notes represent, and the fear that I will forget again that I ever took these courses, it’s really hard to pitch any of the things I wrote! And then there were writings by my dad and my grandfather, too… I got about half-way through making decisions before I quit for the day. We had dinner at about 8:30, and afterwards transcribed a poem my grandfather wrote for my grandmother after my mom’s birth (we had found the card with the poem among my grandfather’s many things). Then we called it a day. (More visitors tomorrow!)