Today was a quiet day with fewer miles! But we had a visitor that neither my mom nor I had seen in decades, so it was a lovely time. They were expected for dinner (more on them below), and I had volunteered to make us a nice meal, so Mark and I went grocery shopping early in the day and I shooed my mother out of her kitchen (an accomplishment, as far as I am concerned) to make a fruit tiramisu that was one of the kids’ favorite Imke desserts, and chicken fajitas with the works–pico de gallo, avocado cheese, sour cream and some surprisingly authentic corn tortilla chips (the German store-bought salsa, on the other hand, was really more of a very sweet, spicy barbecue sauce). When our friend Catrin and her husband Jens came around noon, I quickly threw everything together for an excellent and at least somewhat exotic “American” lunch (with a delicious but not very American dessert). After lunch, we took their dog, a sweet labradoodle named Herr Huber (the German variant of the grocery store owner on Sesame Street, Mr. Hoover), for a walk to the Westerberg park, and then we all had coffee before they had to leave around 4 pm. It was a lovely time. I’ve known Catrin since I was three and probably last saw her when I was 9 or 10. She, her brother, and their mother (Hille) and father, both teachers, used to live in the same boarding school where my mom and dad were dorm parents for about two years in the late 60s, and I sometimes hung out with Catrin and her brother Holger, as documented by some of the photos that she brought along from her mom’s photo albums. I remember playing with them and watching tv with them quite well–we had only two TV channels and they had three!–and I also remember Catrin coming to my rescue when I fell into some barbed wire and scratched up my knee with it. But I was about 5 when we moved to the town where I spent the rest of my childhood in 1971; the family came to visit us a couple of times and vice versa. My mom, who is excellent at staying in touch with old friends, had exchanged letters and Christmas cards with Catrin’s mom Hille ever since, and when Hille passed away in May, she and Catrin spoke on the phone for the first time since those childhood family visits, and I wrote her a condolence card. We traded a couple of emails, and since she and her spouse were able to make the time to come to Osnabrück (a 1.5 hour trip by car from a town near Hanover), they decided to stop by while I was still here. We compared memories and looked at her photos together, and caught each other up on 4+ decades of everyone’s life. It was a lot of fun, and because Imke had kept in touch with Hille, it wasn’t all completely new. But we would have not recognized each other based on our childhood memories of playing together!
After Catrin and Jens left, Mark and I went for a long walk through parts of the city center we hadn’t covered yet (including the Cathedral or Dom, along the old city moat, and back around to the shopping center, where I managed to find a mid-century platter and gravy boat for Andrea’s remodeled kitchen. We were home by 5 pm, and since I decided to be Domestic Goddess today, I set up our bread-cheese-and-cold cuts dinner (plus the leftovers from the divine dessert). It was warm but a bit cloudy and thus perfect for us to sit under my mom’s apple tree, a wonderful outdoor spot for a meal that we hadn’t been able to use yet. But that was it for our adventures today. It was nice to have another mellow day.
