This was our second and last day with our family here. I remember classic family visit days in Beuren where it felt like all we did was sit, talk and eat, with one meal running into the next. That was as hard on me then as it is now (sitting still has never been my forte), and I was glad we could break up our visit a little with multiple walks through beautiful countryside.
Walk # 1 was just a short loop through the town of Leinefelde after our vacation rental breakfast. There is not much to see (except that the state garden show or Landesgartenschau is here this year from April to October, in which the region invested quite heavily and which is expected to attract a lot of visitors–but we did not go). But it was a nice little walk, and we did see one of the areas where the river Leine begins–not at one spring, but a larger area with a total of ten springs, one of which is right in the middle of town.
Then we hung out at the apartment for a bit; I finished the very long blog post for yesterday; Mark actually got a little work in (as intended), and Imke was reading the guidebook she had gotten us for Göttingen. Mark and I had the leftover pizza from Friday, but Imke just wanted to cup of coffee and a little chocolate. Then Mark and I took off on Walk # 2, from Leinfelde to Beuren on the bike trail, about 2.3 miles / 3.7 km. Verdant and relaxing, through fields and woods, and with lots of birds to listen to (and very occasionally see). We spotted a thrush (Drossel) on its nest and also saw a red kite (Roter Milan) overhead later on. But it was tricky to spot the really tiny but colorful European Goldfinches (Stieglitz) that we could hear in a row of trees by the soccer fields right outside of town. So again no pictures!
Meanwhile, my cousin Evelyn picked up Imke by car, and we all met at the house just around 2 pm. I had the wonderful chance to hear Irmgard tell us about her youth in nearby Kirchworbis, and her transition from an eight-grade education and working in a knitwear factory at 17 to daycare worker and later elementary school teacher in Beuren, teaching reading, writing, and music classes. She talked about the complicated life of holding down shift work jobs while taking night and weekend classes, with 8-mile walks to and from the train that took her to her classes. But she was also gushing about her teaching days, and about the many people in town that still recognize her as their teacher or daycare teacher who showed them how to make “Berlin Air” for dessert–egg whites with fruit juice beaten into a light foam, a cheap delicacy I had never heard of.
Then there was a great hustle and bustle to get a coffee table set, because other members of the family were joining us, so that nine of us were gathered in Irmgard’s living room for yummy rhubarb and strawberry cakes: Irmgard and Evelyn, and two of the three siblings of Irmgard’s spouse, Friedwald, who passed away last October: Doris, with her spouse Günther, and Gisbert, with his wife Sabine. All live nearby, in Leinefelde and Heiligenstadt. Gisbert, my dad’s youngest cousin, and his wife Sabine had brought old photos and we talked family history. This meant talking about the history of Gisbert’s own father, my dad’s maternal uncle Hermann, who lived in this house with his wife when we first began to visit. (His father Joseph Huke, so one of my paternal great-grandfathers, owned the house before him, and I assume Hermann inherited it as the first-born of the eight kids.)
But it also meant talking about prior visits, including several made by my parents and then my father without my mother. I had not realized that less than a month before the wall came down in November of 1989, my dad and his best friend Friedel came for a planned visit to Beuren, and everyone was sort of on high alert because things were starting to really come apart at the seams in East Germany. Gisbert told a story of Friedel and Elmar coming to one of the many weekly protests happening at the time, this one near the famous Wartburg, with Gisbert and his family. When my dad started taking pictures, they all got quite nervous, because they feared that the protesters would think that they were Stasi spies trying to keep track of who was attending and start a fight with them! Gisbert described my dad being “like a brother” to him–he was the baby of the family and his older siblings teased him quite a bit and never took him quite seriously (since he is the comedian of the family, not exactly surprising). Everybody in Beuren loved my dad, but they also loved my mom, and when they split up in the mid-1990s and my dad remarried, they were quite upset with him and never quite warmed up to his second wife, Heidi, although they visited once or twice.
After generous portions of cake and lots of coffee, Gisbert and Doris and their spouses said their goodbyes, and we all sat in the garden for a bit longer. It had been a very blustery, gray morning, but the sun came out and we had a good time sitting and chatting a little more, before I whisked Imke away on a little walk to listen to some of the birds with me. My hope was that we would see one of her favorite birds, a skylark (Feldlerche) but although we heard many faintly in the fields, none of them rose straight up into the air singing, which is a spectacular sight and sound. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful if short Walk # 3 before there was yet another opportunity to eat. Evelyn and Irmgard put together a lovely Abendbrot, with many special regional cold cuts and sausages and also the local variant on sour cream (Schmand) which gets used here as a spread on bread (like cream cheese, but much more liquid) but also as a baked topping on yeast coffee cake with fruit, which I remember fondly and am very sad we didn’t have this time. Tante Annis Schmandkuchen (usually baked with the small European plums that are so delicious) was a simple everyday cake that she always had at the ready, but an unforgettable delicacy for me that I never got quite right when I tried to bake it.
After THIS sumptuous meal (around 7:30 pm), Mark and I decided we would take Walk # 4 back to Leinefelde, which did us both very good. We loved retracing our steps in the evening sunlight, heard many more birds, and just had a good time being outdoors, in motion, reviewing the day. Imke was driven back by Evelyn and met us around 8:45 at the apartment. We were all very tired and truly just fell into bed that night!
