Headed South

It seems I have lost the thread. Again. The last time I committed to a blog, the posts petered out while I had another baby and watched it grow into a little boy. I know other people manage to multitask, but when there’s something important going on, my children have always managed to commandeer my full attention. And now it is the first child, leaving for a year-long exchange to Spain, which is, in spirit if not geographically, lightyears away from Germany. Oh, right, that’s where the thread was supposed to lead: home at last, in Brandenburg.

Instead I find my mind on Seville. I sit on R’s bed and gaze at the map she left behind on her bedroom wall, a puffy red heart sticker adhered to her new home. I mope around listening to flamenco music while M tries to get my opinion on details for his plans of the house. Do we want a window here, a stairway there? Paco de Lucia’s guitar, along with some unnamed stomping feet and clapping hands, provides the soundtrack to my semi-empty nest – music that is simultaneously plaintive and rousing. I answer M’s questions with one of my own: Do we really want a house in Brandenburg? He counters with violent eye rolling.

Yes, it’s this again: my inability to focus continuously on a single goal as long as it takes to achieve it; to want something as long as it takes to get it. M’s solution is to drop the subject. He will draw up the final plans without me. And since I already found someone to take Herr G’s place – back before the Andalusian crisis hit – our Prussian garden is also progressing despite my ambivalence.

Autumn is here and change is afoot. I feel old and deserted and the last thing I need are falling leaves and barren trees. But O is excited because it means there will soon be an excavator on the property. The new guy, Herr K, will use it to dig a long ditch, where he will plant things that can grow in this sandy soil and are hopefully hearty enough to survive Germany’s long and dark winter.
09.09.19