...und ein gutes Deutches Bier

My mother and I have just spent nearly an hour polishing the armoire in my grandmother’s apartment. This armoire has been in our family for over 70 years and my mother, my uncle and I are doing everything we can think of so that the armoire can stay put. My grandmother, at 95, has decided that she no longer needs to keep her apartment and is just fine, thank you very much, living at the retirement home. She has decided instead to rent out her apartment to a lovely elderly woman whom we very much hope is in need of a beautifully polished 70 year-old armoire. My mother, uncle and I all want this armoire for ourselves because it’s gorgeous, solid wood and hand carved. As you can imagine, it’s also very heavy. Unfortunately, none of us live even remotely close to where this armoire is currently located in Marl, Germany, so we are desperately hoping that Frau Franz will have a use for it since frankly, the idea of disassembling it and getting it down to street level causes us all to break out in hives.

2008, thus far, has proven to be the year for me to clear out other people’s life accumulations having just finished this same task at my parents house after the death of my father in March. The difference though is that this time I can ask my grandmother about the history of specific items and my grandmother (who happens to have a memory like a steel trap) can tell me all about aunt Agatha who was born in 1812 during the Napoleonic Wars and probably received the item in question as a wedding present around 1830….Whereas I will never know why my father thought it necessary to accumulate 20 needle-nose pliers during his lifetime.

So I find myself in Germany, on the invitation of my mother, cleaning out my grandmother’s apartment and deciding what to do with a half-complete set of Weimar silverware and a beautifully polished, extremely heavy armoire. After 7 months of living out of a suitcase it has become painfully obvious that at some point I will need to stop travelling for a minute and, you know, maybe get a job or something, but in the meantime I’m feasting righteously on sausages and good German beer – enjoying the arrival of spring in Germany–a never-ending progression of rain-infused weather systems.