Life: Idiotropic

Springter - meaning, spring and winter, or, this strange time of year when we are walking with one foot in each.

All the daffodil bulbs in the medians and roundabouts in the area are blooming. And, we've actually had sun. But even with the sun shining and the flowers blooming in the trees and traffic circles, it's cold. Painfully cold - so much so that yesterday it snowed 20 whole flakes while I was walking through the Geilenkirchen centrum.

It felt like someone was playing a trick on us. Macaira asked - what was that? I didn't know what she was talking about, but then I felt it too. Huh? What was that? Couldn't be snow. But it was. And then I started mentally counting them. One, two, three.... 20 flakes in about 10 minutes of walking.

South of us near Spangdahlem the snow came down much heavier. They actually had real snow. Still, we can claim a small bit here and it compliments the daffodils quite nicely.

So, springter in and of itself is strange which seems to fit here where nothing is normal - at least by my ever dwindling definition of the word.

Today I was leaving my Spanish morning where my friends were all talking in warp speed making comprehension more of a task and the ability to jump into the conversation near impossible. Kind of like taking a walk in a tornado. Interjected comments into rapid conversations are gone before even getting out there.

Anyway... I turned the corner out of my friends' street to see a woman in her late 70's standing on the sidewalk facing her fence. She was wearing black wellie boots, a knee length blue skirt, a jacket, and a little knit cap. In her hand was a flimsy looking electric saw on a long extension stick "thingie" (we had a conversation about this at Spanish morning - they don't have words like "whatchamacolit" and thingie - instead they point and say this, that, or there). This little gray haired German lady was reaching as high as she could with her long saw, leaning into the fence, and pruning the upper branches of the tree in her yard. Amazing what meticulous workers the old generation here is. The younger generation is not the same. The do not work as hard. The ethic is not the same. They want to relax and drink the beer or eat the cake. But Tante Tinny works first. She spent three hours on Tuesday making the yard "shoene sauber." Beautifully clean.

The radio: This afternoon on the way to Schinnen I was flipping through my radio stations. The first was in Dutch. The second, a Belgian station in French. The third was a German station playing a classic American 50's tune (the title eludes me), traslated horribly into German and sung by a less than stellar singer. It was a bit odd. Kind of like The Lion Sleeps Tonight that I heard once in French, but at least that one sounded pretty good. It's hard to find consistent good music here. The stations play too much variety. More American music than local and the local German is, well, exactly what you'd expect at a tacky Octoberfest celebration with the old folksie OomPaPa music. I did hear a modern German tune recently, but it was a ballad to cake as far as I could tell. The entire song described different German desserts in detail. That's strange. One fun thing that has happened in this tri-border, multi-tongued world I live in, is that I can hear the differences between languages that I could never hear before and even in French - a language that is still really foreign to me, I can now hear where one word stops and the next one begins. It's fun.

The oddest thing: Today, post Schinnen, I stepped outside my front door onto the busy main street in my tiny little village to see not one, but two gaggles of German conscripts in full uniform with the German flag patch on their shoulders, their drab green packs full on their backs, and their big scary weapons swinging in one arm. I see them walking with their packs quite often here, but this was the first time I've seen a big group. When the second group got closer I could see feet. Each group carried a man laying in a sling - may be the squad leader? Who knows. In any country, seeing uniformed soldiers with weapons strikes me. Here, they just struck me as being very young. Their cheeks were all ruddy and full. Service in the Bundeswehr is obligatory for young men of age here. I've even seen an occasional female marching with them, but not today. They looked different than what I would expect though. Germany still holds onto a fleeting reputation. A hold over from wounds not yet healed. And with some Germans - the older generation and the police here, there is still that respectful fear. With these boys, there was none of that. They were children in green. Youth without even a glint of that which makes makes most of Europe still hold onto a general distrust of Germans and their Vaterland.