AROUND WINSEN
Again we had breakfast in Vatter, where men are sent to get the bread and brotchen for the day. And then we went on a sentimental drive through the little towns around Winsen that Kathe mentions in her autobiography, “To Think That The Same Shines Over All Of Us”.
Her father didn’t get a car until she was in her teens. It was a tiny car with only room for two in which she and her father would go on Sunday rides. Susie has a box of tiny number bottles with stoppers that she bought at a flea market. In each place mentioned in Kathe’s autobiography she would collect flower petals or dirt or stream water and then make a note of where she had collected them. I took photographs. The house where her parents had lived when she was born in Garssen is gone and has been replaced by a garden store. But the little church where she was baptized is there. But the place that most touched us was the little stream where she and her brother Volker would make little boats and float them down the stream.
Then we drove to Celle to buy a Persian rug with a German design that I had been dreaming about since I first saw it a week ago. We ate lunch at the very elegant Mueller Cafe near the French Gardens with the huge fountain in the middle. Volker once had an apartment right next to the park.
Then we drove back to Winsen.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 