FAMILY
Another marvelous day. After breakfast of fried eggs and brotchen in our apartment we went to the Evangelisch church in the center of Winsen where my wife sang in the choir and felt so at home. The congregation was small and the service unusual. Outside the church under a huge tent was set up a plant sale to begin a 11 a.m.. People were already lined up to buy plants for their gardens. But the plant sale also turned out to be part of the church service which celebrated all living things including plants. The service began inside the church in the normal way, in German of course, with all kinds of responsive readings and hymns and a sermon. Susie and I had only the vaguest of idea what was being said. Then in the middle of the sermon we all went outside where rows of chairs were set up. We sat down and the sermon continued, along with responsive readings which invited, even demanded, that the people waiting to buy plants, with no desire to go to church, join in. The service concluded with the minister instructing us to make a huge circle which made the plant buyers drop their cardboard boxes and hold hands with the rest of us. Then the service was over and a frenzy of plant buying quickly emptied the tables of plants. It was great fun.
After church, Susie and I invited Elke and Heinrich to the nearby Jann Hinsch Hof where we had a wonderful gourmet meal. I had braised ox cheeks with a rich gravy, mashed potatoes and lightly cooked vegetables. It was so good to sit with Heinrich and Elke and to talk.
Then Susie and I were dropped off at our apartment where I napped for an hour and a half, waking up in time for the drive to Celle where we met Susie’s cousins, Maria the movie director, and Eva, the cello teacher, for another gourmet meal at Das Esszimmer. We talked for three hours about Maria’s latest movie plans, Eva’s discussion of the renovation of her apartment in Hamburg where she gives cello lessons, and the recent effort the three sisters made to sell their family home where they grew up and to dispose of all the art work that both of their parent artists, Elisabeth and Hinnerk, Kathe’s brother, had produced.
Finally we said goodbye with Maria still needing to write, on the three hour train ride to Berlin, the funding request for her movie about the last year’s of the life of a writer, Wolfgang Herrndorf, as he was writing a blog about his coming death from a malignant brain tumor. And Eva needed to drive for two hours to Hamburg.
It was a full and wonderful day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 