When we were packing and moving out of our previous homes – Wife’s apartment in Brussels, mine here in Germany – we had these waves of premature nostalgia that made us think we would miss these places – old, familiar, filled with memories – a lot, at least in the early months of the transition. But life in this new home has proven us wrong: we’ve plunged into the business of living here, and although there are moments when the views from this apartment make us stop and stare (and we remind ourselves how lucky we were to find a place like this), for the most part life simply moves along a straight line and keeps us busy, from one week to the next, seldom permitting the extended leisure that is needed to drift into reverie and to think back to the weekends in Brussels.
Continue reading “The new, familiar home” →

I’m sitting in the balcony of our new apartment. Ahead, five rows of near-identical sloping roofs are followed by a line of trees: the beginning of a Wald. To my left, two church spires compete to dominate the view,

and in the distance I see vineyards on low hills, clusters of cottages, arcs of electric wires. On the right there’s a three-storied cottage with a rose vine coiled around a pillar that mirrors, turn for turn, the adjacent metallic spiral staircase. Next to the cottage and just above the line of trees, a dipping sun forms a perfect circle of crimson .

We moved in on the 16th of June. The moving company from Brussels had hired a couple of local hands who arrived in the morning at eight-thirty, an hour after the agreed time. One, a tall German with a brusque manner, went about his business swiftly and efficiently; the other, an overweight Turk, walked about lazily (like a Turkey, Wife said), smoking a cigarette every ten minutes, talking about how to do something instead of doing it. A manager, one would have thought, watching him from a distance. The real manager, the Belgian who had hired these folks, seemed to be doing most of the work himself.

Continue reading “The move” →