GUT SUNDER AND VOLLBUTTEL
In the morning Susie and I were invited by Heinrich and Elke to Gut Sunder, a former estate of a rich man with a huge central home that is now a hotel and restaurant where all of the employees have mental disabilities. Surrounding the large central buildings is a forest with walkways and several large fish ponds. The main room of the cafe was filled with visitors, one long table being a group of 70 year old women who had arrived from nearby Meisendorf by bicycle. Elke ordered for breakfast two three level trays with assorted cheeses and wursts which came with a basket of brotchen and scrambled eggs and coffee along with a fruit bowl. We had a wonderful relaxed time. It was more than we could eat and we brought some of it back to our apartment.
After breakfast Susie helped Elke, 86, in the garden that she can no longer manage and I (88) napped in our apartment. And then at 3:30 we were off again by car for the hour drive to Vollbuttel, the childhood home of my wife Kathe’s father, Ewald Schrader. Vollbuttel is a farm village with traditional fachwerk homes and huge barns where the close knit members of the family still living there gather every Sunday morning for a lunch meal. As was the custom, Ewald’s older brother, Heinrich, inherited the farm while the second son, Ewald, was sent away to school to become a clergyman or a teacher. Ewald became a teacher whose first employment was in the Grundschule in Garsson that we visited the day before. The three sisters in the family married farmers and stayed in the village.
We had apple cake in the garden of the house that Susannah and her daughter Sophia lived in next door to Susannah’s sister who made the cake. Sophia wrote out a family tree so that we would know how everyone was connected. We admired Sophia’s newly painted fingernails and talked about family members, mostly in English since they were more fluent in English than we in German. We toured a barn filled with enormous milk cows and then said goodbye. Susie collected a little dirt from her grandfather Ewald’s home and a nearby stream in her tiny bottles and off we went toward home.
But on the way we decided to eat dinner in the gasthaus Brauner Hirsch (Brown Deer) where my son Tom and his family, along with Kathe and I, stayed on Tom’s family’s first visit to Celle 15 years ago. The restaurant was warm with the chatter of families out for the evening and great fun. And then we drove back to Winsen after another full day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 