One Fainting Robin

Two years ago, we were getting ready to return to Germany for the first time in eleven years, the first time with children.  I lived in Germany for eight years of my childhood, and Tony and I spent our amazing, heartbreakingly beautiful junior year abroad in Berlin.  My childhood in Germany was an idyllic one, full of the lantern walks and wooden toys and handcrafts, playing in the rain and the time in nature we typically associate with Waldorf education here.  But with the beauty of an idyllic childhood comes the curse of worrying whether my children’s childhoods are measuring up to my own.

Their playroom is filled with wooden toys, we walk in the rain, we have a nature table in the corner of our dining room, we even make lanterns some years.  Our little piece of Germany in our own home.  But it couldn’t compare to taking them to my other world.  To my childhood.

I watched them climb the wooden rainbow playground Tony and I had seen being built twelve years earlier.  We showed them the heavy red door to our apartment building in Berlin, the park where we’d spent our afternoons with Bogie, introduced them to our friends who had known us so long ago.

In Freiburg, they waded in the little Bächle running through the cobblestone streets, pulling along their little boats on strings where I had set sail decades earlier.  They saw the green door to my home, and the stone wall in the garden, the one I’d climbed so often, the one over which I’d met Georg, with whom we were staying.  I watched Georg’s mother set the table before my children with beautiful lilacs and wooden Easter bunnies on her red checked tablecloth, and I was reminded of the flower crowns she wove for me when I was a little girl, and of watching her sew a red checked dress for me on her sewing machine.

We hopped along the segments of the snail still painted on the concrete outside my first grade classroom, faded in time and memory.  We rode the bright yellow streetcars, and walked across the bridge flying international flags, the one I’d crossed so many times walking to kindergarten.  We climbed the 331 steps up the tower of the cathedral where I had spent Christmas Eve, dressed in velvet and shiny black shoes.  We explored the marketplace and its beautiful flower stands, and we smelled the pungent smell of olives at the little olive stand that had been my mother’s favorite.

And then we boarded the train for Tübingen.  Oh, how they loved the trains — regional, super fast, double decker, sleeping compartment — they loved them all, as they did the buses and the streetcars and subways.  The every day of my childhood that I had taken for granted, was all new and wonderful to them.  In Tübingen, we stayed with our family friends in whose house I had spent so many days and nights.  I saw my children sitting at the little kitchen table, crafting with the woman who had crafted with me so many years ago.  I saw my children climb the apple tree I had climbed, saw them picking flowers for bouquets and lying among the Gänseblümchen (“little goose flowers”) in the garden.

I walked with them down the paths I’d walked so often as a child, through the town and the marketplace.  We celebrated Easter at my childhood best friend’s house, and I saw them sit at her parents’ table as I had so often, and I saw them be fed and doted upon as I had been.  We rented a row boat and rowed along the river where I had fed ducks as a child.  We walked along the Plantanenallee, the peninsula along the middle of the river, with friends who had known their grandparents for over four decades.  And these friends swung my children high up into the air between them, as they had done with me when I was little.

And it was beautiful.  Every minute of seeing my sweet children in my childhood world was absolutely beautiful.  But one day, as I sat in Freiburg, nursing my baby in the old botanical gardens, I looked up at the brilliantly blue sky and against the sky, the bright green leaves of a huge chestnut tree, one of many in Freiburg.  And it was then I realized, my children still wouldn’t know Germany the way I had.  They wouldn’t know Germany in the fall, the sharp stab of pain that comes with opening the prickly green case to reach the shiny brown polished chestnut inside.  They wouldn’t know the Christmas markets, or learn to ride their bikes over cobblestones, and I knew, as much as they loved this world of mine, as much as I loved seeing them there, they were merely visitors.

And I thought of their childhoods, of what it’s like for them to go to Farm Sanctuary every year, with no adult responsibilities.  I thought of what Crooked Island means to them, of swimming in the cold water, hearing the loons call at night, making blueberry pancakes with the berries they picked around the cottage, their grandmother’s cottage, not mine.  And I realized, they may be tourists in my childhood, but I am merely a tourist in theirs.