After the past number of weeks of glowing, gushing, grateful posts about my Great German Guests, it seems like there can be no other theme for today’s post. Indeed, this evening the house is overflowing with Germans – AB is back for her third stay – MC is here for another couple of days and MC’s two friends – also from Bavaria – dropped in for a quick visit as well. NEVER have the dinner dishes disappeared so fast! Imagine a whole team of Germans scurrying around your kitchen figuring out a better system for putting everything away! And the efficiency with which that dishwasher is loaded! Ach du meine Güte!
What a shame my German mother was not still here to enjoy the company of our young visitors. In an odd twist, just about everyone who has come to stay has been from Bavaria, which was my mother’s adopted home after her family fled from East Germany as the Russians invaded. I grew up with stories of Bavaria and of the war (Mom was born in 1939) and it’s very odd to hear many familiar place names and some distinctive phrases from the region popping up in conversation.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of when my Omi would come to stay (or, when we would go to visit her in Bavaria). I used to love Omi’s stories, one of which was eventually woven into the picture book, Grandparents’ Day. Omi’s family spent some time in Brazil where, as a child, she was bitten by a poisonous snake. The result of that encounter left a spectacular scar on her leg and hearing her tell the story of what happened next (which involved a blacksmith and an impromptu cauterization of the oozing wound with a super-heated poker) was so awful and so cool I loved/hated it when she would say, “Have I told you the story about the snake?” The process of taking such a grim tale from its original state to the final, more-or-less appropriate-for-young-children format was quite the journey…
Hearing all this German being spoken around the dinner table recently has awakened some corner of my brain where, apparently, quite a bit of German has been sleeping. How is this possible that a language can lie dormant for decades only to be activated by endless conversations about how crazy it is we have all these nice big roads and such ridiculously low speed limits? What’s really strange is that I understand the most when I’m not really trying to listen… kind of like the way you see better at night when you don’t look directly at whatever it is you are trying to see.
Speaking of night… time to sign off: Guten Nacht!
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