Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

Beethoven in Bonn On Saturday we saw a little bit of Bonn, the former capital of West Germany.  In the morning we visited the Beethoven House    where Beethoven was born in 1770.  We walked around the tiny house for almost two hours, listening to our audio guides.  Our son, Mr. Numbers, made sure he listened to every track on his guide, all 32.  Elisabeth stopped periodically to draw pictures: the organ Beethoven played in a nearby church, two of the pianos he owned.  She said she wanted to go home and write music.  I was moved by the account, in Beethoven’s own words, of his hearing loss and his intense inner struggle.   We heard portions of his 5th and 9th symphonies as he would’ve heard them at the time they were first performed.  It was a barely audible muffled sound. Though Beethoven wanted to take his own life, he felt he could not, because of his burning desire to to the work he had to do, to write the music that was in his...

 Kölner Dom I couldn’t help thinking of this little pun while we were exploring Bonn on Saturday, but it was already one day late.  Actually, I think Germans don’t pronounce Bonn to rhyme exactly with “gone”--the short o vowel is shorter in duration somehow.  These days if I’m not sure how to pronounce something, I ask Henry.  He seems to be a pretty good gauge. Elisabeth didn’t have school on Friday, so we took a 2 1/2 hour train ride to Cologne (Köln in German) and spent the day there.  In truth, we spent most of the day in and around the cathedral. It was everything I wanted it to be, and more.  I had heard from John and several others who had been there that it is great to go to Cologne by train because when you get off the train you are right there at the cathedral.  What they didn’t tell me is that the church dwarfs the train station.  The windows of the station are huge, and allow only a portion of the cathedral to be se...

Last Saturday it was time to take down the tree.  I was ready for it to be gone--the needles were beginning to drop and there were spider webs from the top of the tree to the ceiling.  Maybe those are always there, but this time I could actually see them close up because the tree was nestled against the stairs and the top was clearly visible from the second floor. Three Kings Day . . .Epiphany . . .Heilige Drei Könige had come and gone.   John and I pulled the boxes down from the attic and the kids began removing the ornaments from the tree.  But this time I wanted to pack them more carefully than usual because they would be traveling across the ocean again.  And that made me sad.   I thought of Christmas two years ago when we were still in The Woodlands and oblivious to the upcoming move.  I packed the ornaments up quickly and we shoved them in the back of our “closet of doom”--the one you can’t stand up in and goes way, way back....