Lineanongrata

Advent giveaway, day 4

Quote of the day, by my sister Johanna:

'...And in the end we apparently drank Feuerzangenbowle. I don't remember clearly. And I don't know how I knew it was on the menu. I mean, at that point I couldn't read anymore. Not even with one eye...'

 

...

Margith, you won yesterday's Advent gift. Will you email me with your address?

 

For all of you who come to this blog by accident or some other unforseen event, I will explain how the Advent giveaway works. Because everyone should participate and everyone should invite even more friends to participate. The more, the merrier.

'Advent' means 'coming' in latin, in this case the coming of Christmas and Christ. During Advent time, a German tradition has us give one small present to our children, or older special loved ones, each day until the 24th of December, which is 'Holy Night' here in Germany. These gifts are supposed to make waiting for the big day a bit easier and a bit sweeter (when you're three, it might just make it worse, but then, a gift each day is a gift each day...). And that's also what I do here on the blog. Each day I give one small gift to someone who left a comment on the last Advent post. If you comment each day (and don't worry, it doesn't need to be poetry to count as comment), you make my day and you get a chance to win a Lineanongrata advent gift.

PS: Comments also make my day in July.

dreaming of a wild christmas (advent giveaway, day 3)

Tonight is a big night in my Westphalian hometown.

It's the beginning of the annual Christmas Market. It will last for three days and my sister and my father have been preparing for weeks. Friday night of the Christmas Market is their big night out. A big father daughter bonding moment.

I have never been there to actually witness the debauchery. But I have been told many a story. And I know my village and most of its inhabitants.

What you have to do on Christmas Market nights is to go out, walk up and down Mainstreet and drink. Everyone else is there, too, so you drink, meet, pay rounds and they pay you back. So you drink some more.

What one has to drink?

Well, there's hot wine (laced with stronger alcohol, in some cases) and various kinds of hot punch. The ingredients are secret, of course. I firmly believe it's better that way.

Sugar is a main ingredient, though, sugar and alcohol.

People whose name I will keep secret forever have been known to loose teeth without anyone noticing until the day after.

My sister has met old friends during those nights and partied until unthinkable hours. Just to meet them again the next day and having them tell her 'Oh, Hanna, we haven't met for years! How are you?'

The way my sister tells the story, she and dad walk around and every once in a while she'll hear a voice yelling 'Hanna, where are you? Do you need more hot wine?!'And my father will show up with two steaming mugs in his hands, grinning from one ear to the other.

...We don't speak about the day after.

'Don't talk too loud' and 'Have you eaten anything yet?' are quotes my mother, who stays at home because she's no big fan of that kind of craziness, has told me.

 

---

Kellie, you won yesterday's gift! Congratulations. Would you please let me know your address?

proper dainty phone habits

 
This is turning out to be a princess blog lately. Bear with me. It could turn into a bear blog next week. Or I could turn out to be funny, who knows.

When I wrote about my doctor and his tender feelings about boxing girls the other day I remembered a conversation I had with a friend a couple of months ago.

This particular friend went to Highschool with me, so I know for a fact that he's my age. Part of a generation where differences between girls and boys practically don't exist, or so I thought.

His mother was my first 'religion' teacher (in Germany we are taught about religion in school) and, according to her, she's the reason I'm a law abiding and honest citizen. She'd probably love for her son and me to marry (we have considered a staged marriage which would free him of the eagle-eyes of his mother and me from any questions from my adopted grandmother who thinks 32 is pretty old to accomplish any woman's purpose in life and to find a husband and have three children).

Anyway, that friend's and my conversations usually turn around the relationship problems or highlights we are living through at any particular moment, and given the fact that he was the first boy I ever fell in love with and the first one to kiss me we usually are pretty honest about it all. The man's also the most naive womanizer you could ever imagine, and no, that description is not a contradiction in terms.

He told me about his latest girlfriend, or soon-to-be-girlfriend or whatever she was at the time, and to be honest, I can't even remember what she turned out to be in his life after that. They had met not so long ago, exchanged telephone numbers, and, lo and behold, she had called him first!

...

...

...

!

My very best boy-friend proceeded to tell me that he thought that was a bit dashing for a girl.

Let me tell you, when I next meet that particular girl, I'll have many things to tell her about proper swooning and dainty phone habits! What is the world coming to, I ask you!?

a finished quilt and a scary ghost story

We might say that I'm no better person than before. Time still is a concept that escapes me. Completely. I underestimated the time it takes to quilt a queensize by about a week.

Now that I think about it, I like time in a historical sense. The time you can name. In ... Julius Cesar had a bad stomach ache because Brutus... . The time I need to do something is a kind I don't manage well and which thus has it's threatening sides.

I managed to finish Hanna's birthday quilt while she was already preparing desert for her birthday barbecue.

After sewing straight through a couple of nights and more than one entire day. Quilting it took so much longer than I anticipated. Very very veeeeeery long.

Scary, too. The last night before my sister's birthday I got home later than I wanted to and decided to sew a little bit before going to bed. At around three in the wee morning hours I went into the kitchen (may I  mention that I was alone at home and that my parents live in a rather big house...) and saw two glass bottles in a place I was sure I hadn't put them in. Really absolutely sure. Because when we were little, putting glass bottles into that space would have meant certain death. Death by housekeeper.

Oh yes, that lady sure had rules.

So there was no doubt I had put the bottles there and had forgotten. It was impossible. 

But nobody else had been in the house the entire day, I was sure.

Immediately I started sweating and my illustrator's fantasy got to working overtime.

You know the drill: 'What about those ghosts and monsters' and the likes. 

Cellar - check. First floor - check. Second floor - check. Third floor, nobody either. Neither monster nor chainsaw murderer to be found anywhere, not even under the beds (God, am I glad nobody was at home to see me peek underneath the beds and behind every door.It's the stuff family legends and family jokes are made of.).

I got myself another beer to assure better sleeping, switched on the alarm and told myself there was no way anybody could get into the house or move downstairs without me knowing.
Which is the absolute truth by daylight.

Only at night I continued hearing noises from the kitchen. Glass making 'clink' against glass. Ghosts putting bottles where they're not supposed to be put.

At five thirty I fell asleep like a stone. Put out by the last beer and sewing straight lines across a quilt for hours.

To wake up at eight because the housekeeper (the one with the strict rules who still works with my parents) made the alarm go 'iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii' and didn't know how to turn it off. Which might have been a good thing because I didn't really go back to sleep and started sewing again earlier than I would have otherwise, finishing the quilt just in time.

Oh, and about the housekeeper with the strict rules ? Turns out she was in the house the night before, while I was still at a friend's house. She came to take in the milk and yoghurt left on our doorstep by the milkman and she seems to have taken to putting glass bottles into no-glass-bottle places.

So what about death by misplacing bottles and breaking the rules, I wonder. The world is coming to pieces if you ask me.

But the quilt is fabulous. Absolutely worth it scares and work. When my sister unwrapped it (got the cheesiest wrapping paper, too. Silly circus scenes on dark blue. After all my parent's house is in a village of 8000 people and an estimated six ghosts per person. One can't expect to find anything super fancy there.) she uttered 'oh my...'. And something about a lot of work.

I quilted each circle circly and every square separately with straight lines. One with a larger space between seams, the next with minimal space between them, and the result is something very lively. The back is white, made of old cotton sheets that still show my grandmother's and great grandmother's monograms.

 

Thank you, Amy, for sharing the roundabout design.  

home

Home is where putting on a winter sweater in the middle of July is acceptable.

stories from my hometown - our crazy bus(c)h

In the title for this blog post I should have added  'and many gratuitous photos'. Because the story I want to tell tonight has nothing to do with snowy pictures. Those are here for my own happy self because I simply love the fact that it's snowing right now, in front of my window. My family can't see the white flakes any more without having the feeling that winter will never end, but for me it's simply wonderful. But then, I had a cold and frosty winter only intermittently.

Today I want to tell you a short story about 'our' crazy Bus(c)h.
You had George W. I'll grant you that.
But we had nobody-ever-knew-his-name-crazy-Busch. Son to one of the village natives. He was a genius in maths and went to University right after High-school to study complicated mathematical problems. I don't know if something tragic happened in his family at that moment, or if University life was just too much for him.

He just didn't make it, mentally. He stopped washing, always wore a woolen hat and a huge sports bag. Never looked up at somebody. He was probably afraid of everyone and everything.
But he continued to go to University, at least sometimes. Took the bus from our village to the city, sat in at mathematical classes. Took the bus back to our village. Never spoke to anybody.

The fact that he couldn't deal with water or electricity bills any more left him with a problematic body odor. Which finally got so bad that he was forbidden to take the bus.
But before that we would instantly know that he had entered the bus we took back from school (we don't have the yellow school bus system. We just took the regular city buses), everybody would instinctively duck. The smell was that bad.
Then he would appear, woolen cap on his head and sports bag in hand.
Huge sports bag that he never let go of.

One day a friend of ours asked him what he had in his bag.

'Candy bars and my soul' was what he replied.

stories from my hometown - the taxidriver and our curtains

Today's story is still about our house. About our curtains, to be precise.

What ? You don't see any curtains ?

That's because we have none.

The grandmother of three kids we grew up with was the village taxi driver. A taxi driver with a passion, I might add. She loved to drive, she needed to drive and she drove until the day she died.
When we were children she did the taxi job more or less only for her old acquaintances. She didn't have an official 'Taxi' sign on her car, but the Mercedes was the right color (and came from the right manufacturer, for a German Taxi).
She was also a native to this village, knew everybody and loved to gossip.

My family isn't from here, my mother comes from Berlin and my father from the South of Germany, and when they first moved here they lived way out in the country on an old farm.
But when they bought the house in the village where they still live now and where we spent a large part of our childhood, the entire village was instantly grateful.
So many occasions to gossip about the newcomers. Really. Gossip for years and years.
Some recurrent themes were the garden, the color of the house, and, believe it or not, our curtains.
The non-existent curtains.
Apparently we were the first household in this village to have neither shutters nor curtains we closed at night.
Our taxi driver was so grateful she got into the habit of always making a detour with everyone she ever drove, just to show them how well you could see into our house. Drove really slowly, too. To get a good look.
One day at the baker's she got hold of my mother and told her that she thought it was absolutely fabulous that our house didn't have curtains and that she just loved to look inside.

Her family was acutely embarrassed by her stories, of course, but I will remember them all my life, I think.

There is one where she was invited to a ball and worked in the garden while she waited for her friends to pick her up. When her friends came, she jumped into the car and noticed only when she went into the ballroom that she still had her gardening clogs on beneath her pretty dress.
One time I met her at the bakery, too, and she was just telling how a client called her early one morning because he needed to get to the train station very quickly. She accepted the commission, just put a coat over her nightshirt and drove. Only to find that the train had already left. She was then obliged to follow the train, never actually catching it, and ended up driving her client to the Airport. In her nightshirt.

Just imagine she had chosen to be less embarrassing to her family and keep all her stories to herself. What would I have written about today ?

stories from my hometown - our house and the murdering butcher

When you see my two feet firmly planted in snow, it can only mean that I'm home in Germany.
It was my mother's birthday on Valentine's day and it will be my best friend's and my birthday Saturday and Friday, so that seemed just like the right occasion to come home and visit. Hanna and I even had our brother with us for the weekend and our mother's birthday party, and being with my two siblings is one of the greatest joys for me (has been ever since we were adults and stopped pushing and shoving each other).

When I come to this tiny town in Westphalia (that's rather in the north of Germany) it reminds me of all the stories that are linked to this place. There are our private family stories, the stories told about our family (should we call them semi-private ?) and the village stories. They range from the hilarious to the tragic, some are about the people everyone knew while we were kids here, some are legends, some concern those whose names and stories we have either forgotten or would rather not be reminded of.

And while I was standing in the snow in the middle of our garden today, I thought of the story about our house.

It was built in the 1930's. I don't know whether the butcher built it, but he lived here. His butcher's shop was right in the house as well.
He wasn't young any more when he fell in love with a girl from one of the neighboring villages. Maybe it's legend, but if the stories I heard are to be believed, he was already an old man and she was barely a girl.
He didn't have a car and always took the bus to go see his beloved. Even today that's a fifteen to twenty minutes ride by car over land, but in the 1930's and by bus that must have seemed like a day's journey.
But the butcher was in love and never hesitated to take the trip.
Until the day he found out that his young lover had found a man, or rather a boy, her age and had fallen in love with him, and fallen out of love with the old butcher.
That was the day the butcher went to his butcher's shop, took a great knife, and put it in a bag. He took the bus, went to see the girl he loved and killed her and her new lover.
He put the knife back in his bag and took the bus back to our village, where he was arrested for murder. He died in jail, of course.

How's that for village life and village lore ? When people tell this story there is a hint of sensationalism, but it still is a down to earth story from Westphalia. A butcher's story. And believe it or not, there are no ghost stories associated with our house. No white clad figures with knifes running around the place.