Making the “Most” of Autumn Memories

This weekend we enjoyed the best of autumn in Germany. Oh, it was rainy and gray. That is normal. But the leaves have changed color, people are wearing their wooly sweaters, and it’s fall festival season. If I suspend realization that fall is the opening act for the long cold winter, I can live in the moment and really enjoy the gifts of this time of year.

Saturday Dave and I attended a regional market and fest in Tübingen while the kids were in a theater workshop. Tübingen is one of our favorite towns, with its gorgeous bridges, old Fachwerk (wood-beam) houses, cobblestone streets, and willows bowing into the Neckar River. It’s a university town, so it is truly international and open, maintaining that delicate balance between progress and tradition. There we bought some goat cheese, farmer’s bread, candied quince, and Hollunder (elderberry) blossom syrup to mix with fizzy water for one of our favorite drinks.  Oh, and I got a fabulous new pair of red high-tops, just to enlighten anyone who may have suffered from the delusion that I'd grown up.

On Sunday we went to the Holzgerlingen town fall festival and flea market. There we enjoyed drinking fresh apple cider (known here as Most, pronounced “m-OH-sh-t”) straight from the old wooden press. We walked through the town museum, chatted with local friends, and enjoyed eating shrimp scampi, fish ragout and calamari. At the flea market, Luke was thrilled to find a 530-piece (I kid you not) race track set with remote control cars. That afternoon he and Dave spent nearly four hours setting the thing up. Then we had to move furniture around to make room for it to stay up since once it gets taken apart, I doubt it will ever be put back up again.

Monday Dave was off for Columbus Day and the kids had school, so he and I spent the day filing and converting old home videos into DVDs. I laughed and cried watching babies learning to crawl, school concerts, Christmases and birthdays, long-gone pets, and family reunions. I saw us as young, sparkling new parents with that luster of idealism and energy about us. I’m not complaining, but it truly is sobering to realize how much the kids have aged us in eight years.  Or maybe it was Iraq that did it.  Or Hurricane Katrina. Anyway, we looked much sweeter back then.

Seeing those films of Luke and Claire as toddlers felt like reuniting with loved ones from long ago. It’s funny how much I’d forgotten exactly how my kids looked and sounded when they were small. It’s like at the end of each day my image of them gets shaken away like an Etch-a-Sketch, only to be replaced the next morning by a new image. After a while it’s hard to remember the earliest versions of them. It helps if I remember that growing up really doesn’t mean leaving childhood behind. Instead, it means growing new layers like an onion, so that somewhere in the center of each of us is still that very small child that needs love, attention, and affection. So when I tucked the kids into bed last night, I hugged each one a little tighter and said a thankful silent prayer that even when I am 99, they will still be my babies.

I was also reminded that I really need to take more video of us nowadays. It’s easy to think that we’ll never forget all of our rich experiences living in Germany. But with my memory as holey as a colander, I know better.