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Germany

Giving Thanks

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Two years ago, my partner and I went to an American Thanksgiving celebration in Munich hosted by friends from Singapore. Shortly thereafter, memories of turkey with cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie still on our minds, we decided to make Thanksgiving a feature of our intercultural life together.

Without thinking much of it a year ago, I suggested to my parents that they spend the following Thanksgiving in Germany. It had been strange, they said, celebrating with their friends and their friends’ children with none of their own children around. “So come to us,” I said, and they booked flights. “We’re hosting Thanksgiving,” I told my partner after one phone conversation not too many months ago. It took us both a little by surprise.

In the train station just moments after my parents arrived on Friday night, my partner turned to me: “I hope the turkey’s not frozen.” As a group, we agreed that it wasn’t and that we’d adjust if it was. In my dreams, I was up to my eyeballs in vegetables while my partner was out trying to catch the turkey, which had inexplicably morphed from being frozen to being alive. With our oven schedule dictating our Saturday morning alarm, we woke to the first blue sky seen in a week. A good omen if there ever was one.

Although we’d one day love a Thanksgiving with thirty-odd people, this year’s gathering was small. Along with my parents who spent the day preparing with us, doing the normal daily life things that people who live far apart don’t do together, we hosted my partner’s parents and a couple of friends who knew of Thanksgiving from American television and film. It was a first Thanksgiving to host, a first Thanksgiving to attend, a first Thanksgiving celebrated in Germany. Firsts for us all.

In the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, we rearranged the furniture to seat everyone around the coffee table. In the kitchen, we laid a table of turkey and cranberry sauce (the essential ingredient of which my parents brought from the US), two kinds of gravy, mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables, lemony rice, green beans, and baguettes topped with squash and ricotta cheese. Later came pecan squares, pumpkin pie, real whipped cream, and ice cream. We served beer, wine, and Glühwein (mulled wine), and rounded out the evening with a round of our favourite schnapps.

Somewhere between turkey and dessert, my mum suggested sharing what we’re grateful for. This is something my family has always done, and I told the group about the lists we have written in the past and tucked into the purple Thanksgiving folder that comes out once a year. With some wet eyes (or water in the beard, as the German expression goes) and pauses for translation into one language or the other, we went around the table and shared a little of what was in our hearts.

By the time the kitchen was clean in the wee hours of the morning, my throat was sore from talking and my face from smiling. Had gravity not been pulling me firmly to the ground, I would have soared. To look around a room and feel so much love, to hear the same well wishes and hopes spoken in different languages, and to feel so much at home among all of it is a moment for which I am thankful.

Bad Herrenalb, Germany – February 2023
On My Mind

The Rain

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We had just finished clipping gear to our harnesses when the phone rang, and, without a word to each other, we knew. The call was predictable and short, as were the tears that followed. We packed away the gear and the rope and descended as quickly as we could.

We drove, and my thoughts were full of you. It’s been two and a half years and there you were, all over again.

At the house just over an hour, a long hour, later, we split up the tasks. Some drove to the hospital, some stayed home. I had never met the last person to arrive nor spent time alone with any of them, but that didn’t matter anymore, either.

There was some managing and organizing to do, but mostly we waited. We didn’t know what we were waiting for, so that was hard to explain. We made up excuses that grew increasingly unbelievable, and we were relieved when the waiting was over and the truth-telling began.

And then we waited, one eye vigilant, and the initial shock began to soften. Fatigue set in.

When I wasn’t doing something else, my thoughts went back to those last days with you.

A flurry of phone calls with those who couldn’t be there, who needed to be there, who made plans to come, who are probably there now as I write this. I tried to explain what no one else understands, which is how desperate, how lonely, how cruel it is for the body to be somewhere else when the heart and soul are where the body should be, wants to be, cannot be. The mind spins a thousand tales and the time crawls by. It takes effort to resist calling every half hour, every hour. At least everyone who is there knows what’s happening as it happens. The distance, no matter how far, is crushing, and there’s no comfort when it’s needed. Waiting becomes synonymous with existing, even when you don’t know what you’re waiting for. No one should have to grieve alone.

The questions of what comes next and what happens now and who is responsible for what, questions that have been avoided all this time, suddenly appear perfectly rationally, calmly voiced by people who are anything but calm and rational. It gives us something to do and somewhere to bury the fog, even for a moment.

There is a stark and sudden shift between laughter over old pictures, tears over memories, and the utter stoicism of plans that need to be made.

We got home late and stayed up late, finally sleeping fitfully, a sleep full of too many dreams.

I spent the day thinking of you and looked for moments to talk about you. I’m still thinking about you now and writing about you, too.

As we walked up to the crag, the sky grew dark and we found ourselves under a raincloud that hadn’t been in the forecast. We stood at the base and followed the lines of our routes in the guidebook, pleased that the sun had come out and a light wind had picked up; the rock would dry.

“That must have been the rain,” you said as we hurried back down towards the car. “And then he found his peace.”

The roads were completely dry. That must have been the rain.

Weimar, Germany – February 2024

On My Mind

The Old House

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Whenever I dream of “home” I dream of the old house, specifically the kitchen, which was always my favourite room.

I remember the walls yellow and later orange-red, the cherry wood table and matching chairs stained with a blue accent that I knew was beautiful long before I was old enough to develop taste in furniture. I wonder if there are still math problems visible on the soft wood when the sun shines just right. I wonder if they can still be felt when you rub your finger along a seemingly smooth surface. It was always bright in the kitchen, even when it was dark outside, and I remember the upheaval of removing one pantry to build a desk and replacing the floor that children and toys had long treated too harshly.

The kitchen was the geographic centre of the old house, the first room you saw from the front door, and the first room you entered after bursting through the mudroom door in playclothes, smelling of sun and sweat or peeling off layers of snowpants and gloves. We did our homework at the kitchen table, ate dinner as a family, played board games, sat around to share the worst news and the best news. Almost every photo that we have from a birthday or holiday was taken in the kitchen. Every gathering with friends and extended family started and ended in the kitchen.

We always had a radio there and we listened to talk radio in the morning and music in the afternoon. Sometimes the bird was out on the island when we got home from school, and late in the evenings, the dog turned the island into a race track. The kitchen was the part of the house we lived in, and it’s the room I picture when I think about growing up.

I don’t remember much from my dream last night, but I was back in the old house, back in the old kitchen. I haven’t been inside since I moved to Malaysia nine years ago, shortly after which my parents sold the house and moved across town. I drove by once and soon I’ll drive by again to show it to someone who has only seen it through Street View on Google Maps. The photo there is of a house where I still lived, the car in the driveway not yet my brother’s. I wonder what it looks like now. I wonder what parts of it are best-loved now.

The kitchen is the room I always want to see when I visit a home for the first time. That’s the room I want to be in, the room where I feel most invited and most comfortable. Guests are shown first to other spaces, but kitchen parties are always the best parties. Time in someone’s kitchen is intimate, cozy, personal, and I think there’s some love there, too. It’s in the kitchen where we work alongside one another, where we see what’s not so tidy, where we take raw ingredients and make them into something magical.

It’s no surprise that the kitchen in my parents’ “new” house is the room I’ve spent the most time, the room I like best. It’s the first room you see from the side door, which is the only door they use, and it’s the room that contains the daily traces of people – reading materials left on the counter, coffee cups out ready for use, recipes tucked under the fruit bowl.

Last night I dreamed of the old house, which is always the case when I dream of “home”. My dream started and ended in the kitchen, and as always, it took me right back.

Vienna, Austria – January 2020