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. They sat there until August when the packers pulled them out, taped up the boxes and put them on the moving van.
It’s amazing that there weren’t more ornament casualties. Last Christmas we unpacked only one broken ornament and it was salvageable. For the past several years we’ve added to our ornament collection 3 or 4 at a time (3 before Henry was born). It started with John and me buying ornaments, for each other and for the children, that represented something significant about the past year. The year that we dog sat for 2 or 3 months he got me an ornament of a woman walking a dog. Elisabeth maintains that the ornament represents Miss Amy--dentist and owner of the dog we took care of-- because the woman is wearing a lab coat and the dog is a golden retriever. That’s just fine. It makes me smile and fondly think of her. We have a gymnast for the year Elisabeth took gymnastics, a ballet dancer for one of the years Elisabeth took ballet, farm house for the year Elisabeth learned to sing Old MacDonald. The tradition changed a bit last year as we let the children choose their own ornaments. Henry ended up with a small wooden “Laufrader”--a walking bike--representing the year he learned to ride his bike (but without pedals). This year he found a very fragile cement truck. I’m not sure what it represents, but we will remember who it belongs to.
The ornament that we found broken last Christmas was a painted glass house that represented God’s protection over us during Hurricane Ike. The back of it was knocked out, but it still hung together. We hung it up again this year nevertheless.
So all of these particularly fragile ornaments I wrapped in bubble wrap or set aside for the movers to pack. I didn’t want to trust to chance another overseas shipment.
But I could hardly bear to do it. The process took so long--I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that this is the first of our packing to return to the U.S.
All the ornaments were finally off the tree and John hauled it outside. Then he and the kids lugged it down the street the half mile to the spot where all the trees are collected.
While they were gone, I collected the last few items around the house and pushed them into the boxes. I recalled my mom’s comment the day before and her reference of the church calendar: “It’s Three Kings’ Day . . .the end of the Christmas season. . . I’m ready for Ordinary Time.” We’ve had Advent, and then Christmas, and now, until Lent which begins mid-February, it is Ordinary Time.
Yes, I agree, I was ready for Christmas to be over, but I didn’t think I was ready for Ordinary Time.
During our first few weeks here I became weary of friends in the U.S. referring to our “adventure” here, and how great it was that we could have this “adventure.” In a moment of frustration and transition fatigue I wrote in an early post, “I am ready to drop the ‘adventure’ word from our vocabulary. This is our life now and while we may look back on it as an adventure, it doesn’t feel that way. Adventure is something you have when you go backpacking for two weeks, or when you get a flat tire in the rain, or when you go white water rafting; something that has a high level of unrelenting excitement and is relatively short term. Our time in Germany, while we view it as finite, does not have an observable end and it feels more like ordinary life with a great number of adjustment.”
It’s strange to read that again, because I was just right in my prediction. Now I can say that it’s been an adventure. A brief one with an observable end . . .late May we’re returning to the Houston area. The unrelenting excitement did wane a bit, but no matter how settled we are here, we’re still outsiders. Things are still different to us. Many mysteries remain. But I’m so glad we came.
And so it’s back to Ordinary Time.
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| John and Elisabeth with festive Berliners on New Year's Eve |
Yesterday I went to the dentist and hung my coat on a coat rack before sitting down in the waiting room. That’s something we don’t have in Houston. Granted, in the north I guess there are more coatracks, but we still wear coats in Texas some times and we have no place to hang them. So I will miss coatracks.
And a few other things. Here’s a list I started while waiting for the dentist:
- Coat racks
- Insurance cards with information chips--perhaps some may find this freaky, but I find it so nice just to hand in a card and not have to give a ton of other information on forms 3 times over.
- Trams. I can’t text and drive, but I can check email and read a book on the tram.
- People calling me “Frau Stevens”
- Leberwurst, Bratwurst, Schinkenwurst...
- capitalizing all Nouns in a Sentence, regardless of where they are and whether they are proper Nouns or not
- Not being rushed into and out of a restaurant
- Seeing people biking in the rain with huge ponchos that cover their hands and legs
- Beautiful shopping baskets of all kinds
- Elstar apples. I have never seen them in the US but they are my favorite
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| Grünkohl (kale) and Bregenwurst during Advent |
I’d like to thank a 12- or 13- year old girl for putting into words my conflicted feelings about returning to the U.S. After living in Russia for five years and preparing to return to the U.S., she said, “I feel like I’m tugged in two ways and I have no idea what to do. That’s the one problem with living abroad: you end up getting those weird feelings like, oh I can’t leave, I can’t stay, I can’t leave, I can’t stay.”
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| Just another day in the Adventure: a stop in Berlin on the way home from Warsaw |
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