WINSEN ON THE ALLER
Saturday was the first quiet non eventful day in weeks. It was our first day in Winsen, Kathe’s home town. To really get a feel of Kathe’s home village read her autobiography at kathemosher.com.
Elke’s house is right across the street from the Realschule, pictured in Kathe’s autobiography, where her father was principal.
Our Airbnb is right next to the church that Kathe loved with war memorials for several wars in the churchyard where she listened to her friend Herrmann Constable play the organ,
and close to the cemetery where most of her family was buried and have been dug up after their allotted 25 years. In the spot where they are formerly buried we are going to put Kathe’s ashes which we have slipped into Germany against the law.
Not far away at the edge of town is the Aller river, a little river that runs to Celle, the river in which her brother Bernd drowned at 17. One of the things that I am going to do here is to photograph her town, again, because I have done it before, so that we can remember it as it was on her last visit here with Susie, three years ago.
So the day was a day to wander around and become acquainted again. We had breakfast of Brötchen and two fried eggs at Vatter, a chain bakery store, where there is a morning line of people, come by bicycle and car, out the door as they queue to buy their brotchen and bread to take home for Fruhstuck. Kathe and I had breakfast here many times.
And then we explored a gift shop with all kinds of pens and pencils and paper and books, a very German shop where you say Guten Morgen when you enter, where our non euro credit cards didn’t work. Then we crossed the street to explore the new Aldi, set up very like the Asheville Aldi, but with very different labels and similar inexpensive quality household items. I bought a Mundharmonika on sale because Dorothee in Aschaffenburg said she remembered me playing a harmonica for her when she was eight. She also said I played the recorder quite well, which I can’t remember at all.
We spent the rainy afternoon in our airbnb. At 4 Susie was invited with a car full of chattering women to an organ concert at a beautiful little close by church with an angel baptismal font which was lowered for baptisms. The concert was marvelous.
And then we ate a very German meal of different cheeses and wurst spread on cut up pieces fo brown bread, drank too much wine and came back here at 11 and fell asleep.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 