Life on the 5th Floor: The Weather

Perhaps for my American friends and family, I should have called this blog Life on the 6th Floor, because Europeans number their floors differently than Americans. In America, the ground floor is the 1st floor, but in Europe, the ground floor is level 0. In any case, there are 93 steps from the ground floor to the top floor, and I try and climb those at least 2x a day (to counterbalance the pastries and chocolate--there is no scale here, but so far, my pants fit the same). Since I'm living in Germany now, we'll go with the original title.

We should start with the most important thing first, and that is the weather, of course. I have, for some reason, become obsessed with the weather. I check the weather app first thing in the morning, and often check the weather of all the places where I have family living so I can imagine what kind of a day they are having. Perhaps this also goes back to German 101, when one of the first phrases I learned was "Wie ist das Wetter heute?" (what is the weather today) and so I equate the weather in Germany with something important like "Wo sind die Toiletten?" (where are the toilets).

The weather here was exceedingly dreary and cold all week and the lack of sunshine was a real downer for this Colorado girl. I did not realize how much I depend on my daily dose of sun until it wasn’t there all week. However, when everything seems gray outside you appreciate intense colors more. I climbed up a church tower to get the views depicted here, in spite of the rain.

When the sun does appear, the green grass and the autumn leaves really glow (these next ones were pictures from today--the first day that I actually woke up to sunshine since arriving here).

The highlight of the week was a spontaneous trip to Salzburg on Friday. On Wednesday, our friends, John and Marj Hasler, who are on a mission in Innsbruck, contacted us to let us know they would be in Salzburg for the weekend and invited us to attend a Mozart dinner/concert with them on Friday night. So Thursday we found a place to rent a car and contacted the Gasthaus just outside of Salzburg where the Haslers were staying and left on Friday afternoon. It was an hour and a half (rainy) drive from Munich. At the dinner, there was a string quintet and and two singers who dressed in period costumes and performed beautiful Mozart pieces between courses in the Baroque room of the St. Peters Stiftskellar (one of the oldest restaurants in Europe). It was fun to get out of the city and great to see friends from home. The music was simply sublime--especially the soprano. We especially enjoyed our Saturday morning run through lush green fields and autumnal trees surrounded by majestic Austrian alps. When the Gasthaus owner told us there was a two-hour wait on the autobahn to cross the border into Germany (because of all the refugees coming in), we decided to drive the back way across the border which took us through Berchtesgaden, so we stopped briefly to see the site of Hitler’s hideout during WWII. The sun was out all morning so it was a beautiful drive and we could stop and take pictures whenever we wanted.

 The view from Berchtesgaden

Only those of you who have seen the movie, Inception, will understand this next part. We started the month of October with most of our stuff in storage, living in our friend’s basement. Then we packed up some of our stuff and went “down a level” to live in a hotel in Munich, and then last weekend we packed up a few things to go down one more level to a hotel in Salzburg--a vacation within a vacation within a vacation, so to speak. If you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it and you’ll understand how we felt.

My German is gradually coming back to me, which is reassuring. I read all the signs I can, I shamelessly eavesdrop on the street and in the subway, and I find that words and phrases come more quickly now and it feels less like I’m digging them out of a very deep hole in my brain. As any traveler knows, the post office is always the real test of language skills, and I was able to successfully go to the post office this week and ask for a stamp and understand when he told me how much it was. It felt like a real triumph, especially when I think back to the time when I was 18 in southern France and left a post office in tears. I do have moments of panic when I’m forced to say more than a few sentences, however, and have to curb the impulse to turn and run away. But I can carry on extended conversations in my head, so I guess that’s progress. Here's a great little title from a German hymn book (a great way to practice German too)--it means "Somewhere the Sun is Shining" (and it goes along with the weather theme):

Surprisingly, our little hotel room still doesn’t feel too small. It’s really easy to keep clean--dishes take about 5 minutes (because there are only about 5 dishes in the kitchen); laundry takes a couple of hours to do (and is expensive to use their machines--16 euros to wash/dry 2 loads!), but not long to put away because we only have one closet; and twice a week housekeeping comes and cleans the bathroom and changes the linens. So pretty posh living, really.

Time is still funny--it slips away and drags at the same time. Two of our 7 weeks are gone. I try and get out for at least a little bit each day, although the weather last week just made me want to stay inside most of the time. I’m still averaging about 15,000 steps a day though. At home, mornings were my most productive time to make phone calls, check email and get things done. Here, however, if I have any phone calls to make to the US, I have to wait until night when it’s day there, so my “productive” time to do things like that has shifted. I can still do emails in the morning, but won’t usually get answers until late afternoon or evening. I also miss my family more in the mornings when I know I can’t just pick up the phone and call them without waking them up in the middle of the night. 

We have been grateful for the few friends that we do have here. We spent a lovely evening with our former exchange student and her family this week. We have been really lucky to be able to maintain these relationships that began 6 years ago.

After being so sick the first week, I have definitely been hearing the siren song of European chocolate and pastries this week (let’s blame the weather again, shall we?). I feel like I’m more on track to healthy eating this week though and was able to resist eating any of the following items and to be content appreciating them for their beauty instead.

There seem to be a lot of colds going around. I hear people coughing on the streets, in the stores and on the subways, and our friends have also been sick. Then Joel woke up Sunday morning and was definitely sick, so I went to church by myself and he spent pretty much the entire day in bed, finally getting up and showering around 4pm. Which was good, because he had to go back to work yesterday. He’s doing much better today. Thank goodness for the myriad of herbal teas around here--the peppermint tea has been especially helpful. 

Your German vocabulary word for the day is "Abenteuer," which means adventures. Stay tuned for next week's Abenteuer!

Life on the 5th floor--Part 1

It's been a while since I've written a post, but monumental changes have happened in our "empty nest" lives in the last 6 months, so it's time to start writing again. Since May, we have: (1) sold the home where we have lived and raised our family for the last 20 years (2) started building a brand new home (3) sorted through 20 years of accumulated stuff, giving much away and finding temporary refuge for the remainder of our stuff in a storage unit (and several friends' homes) as well as for ourselves in a friend's basement (4) helped my mom face a major health crisis and go through heart surgery (5) and (because apparently moving wasn't enough of a change) after 26 years of working for the same company, Joel interviewed for and accepted a new job with a company based in Munich, Germany (6) since we were "homeless" this fall anyway, we decided that the best way to start his new job would be to spend 6 weeks living in Munich so he can build new working relationships with people in person rather than from a home office in Colorado. So we are here until just before Thanksgiving and are grateful for all the circumstances that have come together to bring us to this point.

Observations made while living in Munich during my first week:

• We live on the 5th floor of a Residence Inn. Our room would be considered large by European standards as we have a large desk, a sofa, lots of storage in the bathroom and closet and nightstand drawers, as well as a tiny kitchen (tiny=2 burners, a microwave, a small refrigerator, and a few dishes, pots & pans). We have a wall of windows that overlook a lovely courtyard shared by the apartment buildings behind us. The trees are all golden yellow and beautiful.
• Dogs are everywhere--on the sidewalks, on the subway, running alongside their master’s bikes on leashes (I saw a tiny little dog doing an amazing job of this), in the stores shopping for clothes (well, their masters are shopping for clothes). Most of them are little dogs--I’ve only seen a few big dogs. Today I saw two feisty little dogs tell each other off in a barkfest on the 2nd floor of the C&A department store, right there among the winter coats.
• There aren’t very many tourists this time of year except around the Marienplatz. Those that are here for the beer are obnoxious. The others are all charmed and delighted by what they see, so that is nice.
• Our hotel is full of Arabs and Orientals, mingled with a few Americans, British, and other sundry Europeans. The Arab women are colorfully dressed with beautiful head scarves, and most wear lots of makeup and seem very attached to their iPhones and iPads.
• People wear so much black here. Everything is black--coats (especially those), sweaters, shirts, scarves, pants, gloves…. I saw an elderly woman today wearing a lovely sky blue raincoat today and that seemed really daring.
• Also, EVERY woman wears a scarf. And they really like big, fluffy scarves that they just wind around and around their necks. There are no fancy or creative ways of tying or wearing a scarf here. The bigger the better. Most colors, again, are really muted, conservative colors.
• Most people don’t smile much on the streets or the subway. I did get an older man to smile at me today when I was smiling at his dog. Now I know why they think of Americans as so friendly.
• Listening to an organ play in a church in Europe is a magical experience in acoustics.
• I love how this city blends nature and buildings. Most apartment buildings are arranged around a courtyard, and if someone has a balcony, you can be sure there will be plants of some kind on it. Or else window boxes full of flowers.
• Time flows differently here. I have no appointments, no schedule but what I choose, no lunch dates with friends, no jumping in a car to drive wherever I please or to go for a run in the mountains. I’m not sure I remember when time has been so completely my own, except when we first moved to Colorado Springs 26 years ago, before I had children and friends and any kind of established life there. It is a little disorienting. I feel like I’ve been here a month, but it’s only been a week. Yet the days go by so quickly too--before I know it, it’s 1:00 and then it’s bedtime. I am more awake at night because it’s daytime back home, and it’s hard to get moving in the mornings because my body clock says it’s still the middle of the night. I’ll probably finally be adjusted when it’s time to go home. :-)

I'll end with a few photos from the week so far:

An autumnal farmer's market

The Marienplatz 

Autumn ivy and colors abound

Piano in a park by the Isar river. It sounded surprisingly in tune (my father-in-law would have been delighted).

50 Schmifty, or The Olga Effect

I heard an interview last week with the author of a book about Olga Kotelko, a 95-year-old woman who, at age 77, and after never doing any organized athletics other than softball, decided to start running track and field. Over the next 18 years she competed in 11 different events and still holds 23 world records for women in her age group.  I am a runner who didn't start running consistently until 14 years ago, when I was 36, but at the time I thought I'd better start running while I was still young enough and that I surely wouldn't be able to run for very many more years. Hearing about Olga really threw me for a loop. All this time I've been running and thinking, "I'm so glad I can still run--who knows how much longer my body will hold up, because I'm soooooo OLD!" And then I get the Olga reality check and my whole world view goes out the window.  Because if Olga can start sprinting and high jumping and throwing hammers at age 77, then I suddenly have no excuses.

I mean, really, who's to say that I don't go back to school and start teaching English again? Or that I don't start to work full-time and become some super fit 50-year-old personal trainer who helps thousands of pounds get shed every year? Or that I don't start making dozens of quilts per week and wandering the streets of downtown Colorado Springs distributing them to the homeless? Or that my husband won't quit his job and we go off to be photographers/freelance writers in Nepal? Or that I decide to write a Beckett-esque existential American novel about a 50-year-old woman who can't decide what to do with her life and spends the entire 400 pages standing at a crossroads waiting for something to happen?

Well, let's hope I don't do that last one. For all of our sakes.

Anyway, the questions I find myself wondering about the most lately is if, at age 50, I'm not nearing the end of my life's journey, where else do I want to go? What path do I want to follow? What do I still want to learn? Where do I want to serve? This sort of lost feeling reminds me of how I felt in college when I thought I was making decisions about the rest of my life, and that once I made them, there was no turning back. Of course, now I know that was nonsense.  We get to make these decisions all the time. So while I don't know the answers to these questions, I continue to look and listen attentively for answers to my whispered prayers for direction. And in the meantime, we continue forward.

A few days before my 50th birthday in August, I was sitting by my mom's pool with pen and journal in hand,  enjoying the summer sun and thinking about the upcoming big day. Here are some of the thoughts I recorded that day:

• 50 is just a number, a quantity of the number of  years I have been alive. It says nothing about what I've learned or done or who I am or where I've travelled or who I've loved.
• That said, I do feel my body getting older. My hearing is going. I'm having problems with my teeth. When I wake up on most mornings, my back hurts. Blah, blah, blah. 
• But I can still run and work out and sweat. I can hike mountains and take long walks. I can sing and hear the music of Mozart and feel that music deep inside me. I can taste the flavor of summer peaches and smell roses and honeysuckle. All of these things are blessings I still enjoy. 
• My biggest blessing, though, is the love I feel for my family. I've known my parents and siblings for 50 years. I've known Joel and his family for almost 30 years. I've known my children for 19-24 years. These people are all precious to me, and my relationships with them are more valuable than anything else in my life.
• Except God. He has been there for me through it all--through early loves and heartbreak, through fear and loneliness, through a miscarriage and a stillbirth, through the death of my dad, through disappointments and emotional challenges and personal physical and emotional triumphs. He is my rock that is solid, immovable and constant in the midst of the ever-changing circumstances of life.

So while I don't yet know the exact direction that the next 50 years of my life will take, I know that I'm with the right people, that I'm loving the journey and that I welcome whatever blessings and lessons that God will send my way.

Here is a picture of my 49-year-old self

And here's my 50-year-old self, a few days later--proud of my new number

"What do you do?"

I’ve been in Utah this week and have had the great opportunity to see some friends from college and from my childhood who I haven’t seen for many, many years. Our catching-up conversations have been fun and interesting, but over the course of the last few days, I have been asked this question several times: “What do you do now?” Though they don't usually intend it this way, I feel like, people who ask this question are asking if I’ve published a best-selling novel, or if I’m a company CEO, or if my son has become president.

But since I have done none of these things and have instead lived a pretty ordinary life, I have hesitated for a few seconds before answering. Usually I explain that I was a stay-at-home mom, but that all of our children are now grown. But I’ve also realized that doesn’t really answer the question. I do have a job, of sorts--I am a self-employed personal trainer--but that currently only takes up about an hour and a half per week, so that doesn’t really answer the question either. I’ve been trying to come up with some other answers for the next time I run into an old friend who wants to catch up on life, so here is a brief list of some other possible answers:

• I sew quilts (in whatever spare time I have).
• I binge on TV series on Netflix (usually only while I’m sewing, but it depends on how compelling the series is).
• I am the ward Relief Society president (this takes up varying amounts of time).
• I am planning a wedding.
• I am training for a half-marathon (this will be over in a month).
• I travel--with Joel whenever I can, and to see family.
• I tell myself that I am finally going to organize all of my closets, my recipes, my quilt patterns, but I never do (obviously this only takes up a few microns of my time).
• I spend a lot of time thinking about food, mostly trying to pre-think my food choices so I can stay on the healthy bandwagon.
• I make lots of lists, because I have a healthy addiction to good pens and small, portable notebooks, even though I have a perfectly good iPhone with a notes app (which, admittedly, I also use to make lists, but I don’t enjoy it as much).

So that is, generally, what I “do,” though I think that people only ask that because it's what's socially acceptable to ask. I've decided that people who were truly my friends don't really want to know is not what I do, but if and how I’ve changed from when they used to know me. “How have you changed since I last saw you?” would lead to a much more interesting conversation, I think.

This year is brought to you by the number 50

Taylor is engaged!

My initial reaction was with the exclamation point (actually, several of them). We have come to know and love Taylor’s girlfriend over the last 10 months and are so excited for her to join our family. They were both smiling ear-to-ear when they came back from what will now be known as their “engagement tour” of the Garden of the Gods.

Taylor is engaged.

After about 30 minutes of rejoicing, all of a sudden I understood what the sentence as a statement meant--I am old enough to have a son get married. Wow. It’s like that first moment when as a teenager I fully understood that I was going to die one day. Having my first child on the threshold of marriage has spotlighted (with all the intensity and glare of an interrogation) what the past 20 years of hair dye has tried to hide--I am getting older.

I will also turn 50 this year. Normally I don’t start thinking about my age until the beginning of August, just a few weeks before my birthday, but now I seem to have a sort of morbid fixation on the number 50 in the back of my mind at all times. That fixation shows up in the following thoughts:

“I need to finish cleaning out my closets and get rid of stuff I don’t need anymore (because I turn 50 this year).”

“I should make myself a Christmas quilt this summer (before I turn 50).”

“I need to lose 10 pounds before the wedding (because I turn 50 right after that).”

“I should enjoy running while I can (because I turn 50 this year).”

I also find an increased amount of stress to make my activities matter because I have this over-exaggerated sense of impending doom. You know, that my days are numbered from here on out. Logically I know it’s just paranoia, that life really is just beginning, but for the moment I feel like I’m being pursued by a shadowy number 50.  

Last night I had a dream about being on a snow-covered road with snow piled high along the sides. As I looked closer, I saw lots of red rocks showing through here and there in the snow and realized this road was familiar, like the many national parks in Utah that we’ve been to, and yet unfamiliar at the same time. And then I began to notice holes in the snow along the roadsides that showed a terrifying drop below and I realized that what I had thought was a safe valley road was actually a precipice road along the top of a vast rock formation. Upon waking, I thanked my subconscious for terrifying me once again and illustrating my fears for me. Now that I know what those fears are, I can hopefully face them with more clarity and understanding.

Truly I understand that 50 won’t be so bad. Most of my favorite people (my parents, my siblings, many of my friends) have turned 50 without any real drama and have shown me how to accept and embrace the march of time, so I will do my best to emulate them. And I will keep to the road and hope for some spectacular views along the way.

Quiet Time

It’s been almost five months since our son left for college and people continue to ask my husband and I what it’s like to be empty nesters. 98% of the time, our immediate response is “It’s reeeeeeally quiet.” I have become aware of sounds I don’t remember hearing before, like the refrigerator running, the clock ticking, or the furnace turning on. There are definite perks to being the only ones home, like having complete control over our schedules and eating cereal for dinner in our pajamas if that’s how we feel. But the quiet kind of gets to you. It feels almost 3-dimensional, like a tangible presence that follows you from room to room. I soon got into the habit of turning on music or the tv, just to hear some other noise besides the dog snoring peacefully beside me. When my husband has been home alone, he has done the same thing. Yes, that’s right, after years of complaining about how much noise our children made, we were actually seeking out background noise, anything to distract us from the constant reminder of our loneliness.

And then came my Netflix addiction. Shortly after Logan left in June, I started watching the series, The West Wing. After only a few episodes I was hooked. It was then I realized there were SEVEN seasons with 22 episodes per season (yes, that’s right--154 episodes). Well, I thought, it really doesn’t matter because I’m the queen of multitasking and think it’s so wasteful to just be folding laundry when I could be folding laundry and finding out what was happening with Josh and CJ and Toby and President Bartlet at the same time. Soon I was carrying my laptop with from room to room as I went about household tasks. Part way through the 3rd season, when I began taking my pc into the bathroom with me because I didn’t want to pause for 60 seconds, I realized I had a problem. I began to worry I was like the wife in Fahrenheit 451 who only wanted to spend time in the fantasy world of her parlor walls with the shallow, fictional characters there. Or the various characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation who were addicted to running holodeck simulations and couldn’t function in the real world.

Maybe I’m over-exaggerating a bit. I know what is real and what isn’t. Really. And it’s not like I don’t have enough to do to keep me busy. I have too many quilts to make and books to read and people to meet to ever feel bored. But I am beginning to understand that the background noise of music and the intrigue of a good TV series can’t hide or eliminate the fact that I am lonely, that I miss the company of my children. And somehow, simply acknowledging that fact has helped me. Now instead of thinking of the quiet as an absence of noise, I am learning to look at the quiet as a feeling of peace--peace in the knowledge that my children think of our home as a place of love and acceptance, that they want to return here and be with us when they can. I rejoice in the memories of a house full of family noises, I look forward to the future times when the noise of family togetherness will return, but for now I am embracing the sounds of our quiet nest.

Running Home

I ran a half marathon just over 5 weeks ago and feel like I’ve been running ever since. Since the race on Labor Day, I have travelled to 3 very different places--Puerto Rico, Minnesota, and Utah. When I returned from the last trip last week, I decided that it was time to take off the running shoes and stay home for a while. Within an hour of being in my quiet, childless home, I also realized that I had subconsciously scheduled these trips so close together for a good reason--to avoid having to feel the loneliness of this new phase of life.

Logically, I know it’s ok to feel lonely. I just don't like it. It makes me sad and depressed, and who wants to feel like that? So I've decided to see loneliness as a good thing. When I re-frame my sadness, I see that I feel lonely because I also know what it's like to feel loved. Some might say I'm avoiding reality, but I don't think so. I remember when my daughter started running cross country in high school and she learned that a hill wasn’t just a beastly thing to endure while running, but also an opportunity to grow stronger. Seeing it like that didn’t make the hill any shorter or less steep, but it did help create the motivation to push yourself upwards. So the fact that I know what it’s like to feel loved helps me to see loneliness as a way to increase my compassion and love for others.

My recent travels have also shown me that my definition of home has expanded to include far off places. In fact, I now see that “home” is really more of a feeling than a place. My home is here where I raised my family and live with my loving husband who can still make me laugh after 25 years; my home is in Utah where I went to college and where my sons are currently having both good and hard experiences (as only college can provide); my home is in Berlin where my daughter is looking for ways, every hour of every day, to serve people and teach them about God and Jesus Christ; my home is in Minnesota where I grew up and where my siblings still live and where there are autumn leaves of every hue that crunch when you walk on them and beautiful blue lakes around every corner; my home is in sunny St. George where my 84-year-old mom lives among the red rocks and desert landscapes.

I have lived long enough to realize that my definition of home will continue to morph as my life’s circumstances change, and I look forward to seeing what “home” will mean in the next phases of life. And I think that I will keep running and looking for new opportunities at the top of every hill.