Parallel Noises

Good Evening Herr Goethe!

Tyana and rose at Goethehaus

I woke to parallel noises this morning. Not the down-below rumblings and mumblings one is used to in a third story apartment or hotel room, but the loud attack of a garbage truck loading the neighbor’s trash out front, on your street. During the moments before my mind became fully aware of my back-at-home status it read the event as bumpy expressions of a battery of luggage carriers, filled with chained down Facebook pages, crossing an airplane’s runway. It even allowed me a brief viewing of my latest photo album and selected Tyana with the rose in front of your Gartenhaus as a favorite. The mixed up, multi-language dreams of a world traveler who has not yet pinpointed her latest position. 

And then the silhouetted branches of the black ficus in front of my bedroom window reeled me in to the reality of my return to everyday life. The bumping and clanging must come from the recycling truck that picks up paper and plastics and glass bottles to give them a new life.

“It’s seven a.m. Get up. Make coffee. Go to your desk.”

And here it is, the orange glimmer of the rising sun, filtered through bushes along the fence across the street. Bright. Reliable. Twenty-four years of history. 8,760 mornings, take away those spent abroad on journeys, or just away for ordinary reasons. Twenty-four years spent in the same house, the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I know, Herr Goethe, it doesn’t compare to the 50 years you lived in Weimar, but it shows a soothing trend of sameness, a strong probability of reoccurrence. (Discounting an earthquake, of course) I needed this statement after the oddly final imprint I registered when I looked out over the Alte Brücke in Heidelberg on the morning of my departure. Yesterday morning.

“I will never see this place again.”

Lat view from the hotel window in Heidelberg

How strange. A damp cityscape, an icy mountain I had climbed, a river, a bridge, buildings I have been accustomed to for sixty years have imposed their final goodbyes. There are two ways to look at the feeling of “never again,” the first would be too sad to continue. No, I don’t believe that this is the end of my travels. I prefer the second way, the route informing me that I have done all the searching that was needed to put the past behind me. Logos, the deed, words, actions – whatever I want to call it – previous wrongs, old hurts, unresolved anger - have finally lost their sting. I am celebrating a new era.

The sun is shining brightly now above the rooftops. Skeletal wisteria branches entwined with the railing on my front porch tell me that it is still winter. But there is no snow. And here comes the second garbage truck, roaring through the street, the one that picks up the real leftovers. They call it Restmüll in Germany. I don’t have any of that yet today. I just came home.

California morning

Yours,

Gisela.