THE WALK FROM WILDBLUME TO ELKE‘S HOUSE
One of the huge gifts that Kathe, my wife, who died three years ago in May, gave me was her German culture traditions, and the place where I feel this most intensely is in the little town of Winsen on the Aller River which is about twenty miles from the town of Celle where Kathe‘s brother, Volker, lived most of his life as the person responsible for the store windows and general presentation of goods at the large department store, Dettmer Muller. These two towns are special for me.
This is what has brought me back here to Winsen every year for the three years since Kathe died. I didn‘t plan to spend the whole month in Germany here when I thought my granddaughter Caroline was going to be in Geneva doing a medical related internship but that is the way it turned out when she wasn‘t able to come. I am happy to be here for a month sitting quietly much of the time in Wildblume, a rental apartment in the center of town only a ten minute walk from the home of Elke and Heinrich, Kathe‘s childhood friends where I have been going for lunch and supper on most days.
I have hundreds of ebooks I can read, my Vision Pro lets me sit with Yosemite National Park white with snow surrounding me while I have a Mozart Concert (German classical music, another gift from Kathe) playing on a huge flat screen suspended only four feet in front of me with a towering rock face rising behind it and with the spatial music surrounding me, while I can still look down and type on my virtual iPad with my virtual hands, both in video form which seem real enough to the touch, as I am doing now;
This morning I discovered that the spatial videos that I have been putting on daily on Billybaba.com look fine on a flat screen iPad or iMac, but are not only not shown in spatial form on my Vision Pro but are also fuzzy and of lower quality. I thought I was sharing spatial videos, but find I am sharing only fuzzy flat screen videos if someone else is looking at my posts on a Vision Pro. And there is another problem. These videos in any form are removed from the iCloud where they are stored after a month, after which no on can see them. But this won‘t stop me. I‘ll keep trying until I figure this out. What I am trying to do during this month is to record as many experiences of Winsen as spatial videos as I can so that my children, Tom and Susie, and my grandchildren, Caroline and Hannah, will have a visual record of Kathe‘s home town as it was when she last visited here, so that they will have a record of Kathe‘s German past.
Today I am putting on two spatial movies. One is the slow walk from Wildblume to Elke and Heinrich‘s house which is just across the street from the school where Kathe’s father was principal and where the family lived on the second floor of the school. This is a walk that Kathe made hundreds of times. The second one is of Nebenan Cafe, a cafe operated by the women of the churchk, located beside Nebenan, that Kathe loved and where she sang in the choir where Heinrich‘s father was the minister. Kathe loved sitting here with Elke and have coffee and cake.
SLOW WALK
https://share.icloud.com/photos/019k9-iw6MT5GHG65dpf_L22g
NEBENAN
https://share.icloud.com/photos/04ey0arSH964DF4pX_FeFSfQg
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 