Friday, August 12
This was a fairly low-key day, but time is just flying by. But we are getting our miles in! The step count today was 12,467 for me (Mark gets fewer, his strides must be longer), even though I didn’t go run this morning, because we already knew we would be going for a long-ish walk this morning with my mom. We took the bus about 10 minutes further out of town to one of our favorite non-urban walking spaces in this area, around a lake in a forested area that wasn’t too far from my mom’s old place, but quite a ways from here. It’s called Rubbenbruchsee and the shaded walks through mature trees to the lake, and then around it are wonderful. There are also adorable “lawnmowers” on a meadow nearby, Scottish highland cows, which we can never resist photographing. But this time there was a calf, and a rather demanding one at that, wanting to feed when mom just wanted to graze some more. He also stuck his tongue out at us.
Lots of people were out and about walking and biking, but since it was a weekday, it never felt crowded. We walked and talked about old friends and memories and health care and aging, but my mother, a week shy of her 80th birthday, set a pretty fast pace! When we got back to the bus stop, the bus had just left, and it only comes every 20 minutes, so we decided to keep going and walk past my mom’s old house. We actually ran into some of her former neighbors, one of whom (Frau Wilker) has two kids my kids’ age who were their playmates whenever I came to visit and during the year we spent in Germany, living on this very street. It was fun to see her, but also a keen reminder of the passage of time–she and I watched our TODDLERS play together; Lisa and Kati were about 3 when they first met! We got to catch up a little (Frau Wilker’s jaw dropped when I said we had come to celebrate my mom’s 80th–like most people who don’t know better, she probably wouldn’t have suspected she is any older than 70 yet). My mom was happy to see her old house and garden in such good shape (she has visited the new owners and seen how they’ve remodeled the house). But she thought they were letting their rhododendron get too big. We walked the rest of the way home with me ducking into a grocery store to get a couple of ingredients for lunch. Mark’s GPS said it was 5.1 miles total, and my mom wasn’t even tired.
When we got home, just around 11:30, I made us pasta pesto with mediterranean vegetables, which made my mom very happy, even as she joked with Mark about being kicked out of the kitchen (we do not do well working side by side because we get in the way of each other’s fussiness). We all rested a bit and then Mark and I went grocery shopping, trying to get some of the heavier items for my mom’s pantry, since she is doing all of her shopping on foot. We even managed, completely by happenstance, to get a skid-proof foldable step-stool at the ALDI that she can use in her kitchen when she has to open a hard-to-reach window. I discovered on the day we arrived that she currently does it by CLIMBING ON HER COUNTER and protested loudly and with stark reminders about broken hips. Apparently, Judith has given her the same talk, but I have now strong-armed her with a step-stool that cost us 6.99 Euro and even matches the black-white-and-grey of her kitchen.
Then we went on another walk that had two very concrete goals: have some gelato at our favorite ice cream shop (Fontanella), and find a specific item for my mom’s birthday. But we were unfortunately unsuccessful and need to try again tomorrow. We came home at about 5:30 and had the usual Abendbrot (more rolls! more good cheese!), and I spent a couple of hours after dinner making sure I kept promises to people at home to do this and that. I was pretty tired by the time we turned in at 10:30!