In Remembrance

The fact that my father and his five siblings all managed to survive their WWII childhoods and adolescence as Germans on the Eastern Front and live out the rest of their lives as immigrants in the same Wisconsin community teaches a child many lessons about survival and resilience, the hand of fate or divine intervention, an indomitable work ethic, and an abiding sense of gratitude. In their lifetime, they went from fleeing the Soviets by horse and wagon through decades of incredible, rapid change and invention until they might receive this very piece I write here and now on my laptop and send their way on the Internet by hitting a single button on my keyboard.

Let me not be too Pollyannaish: life in a new home in the midst of an evolving world was more than challenging and each faced their own share of trials and tribulations. In fact, as is true of my own life, I often think of their lives in phases, not as a single story but many strung together which often perplex us and contradict our present understanding of the individual. Humans are complex, of course, despite our belief that we really know someone. We likely only know a piece of someone like the square on a quilt which makes up our lives.

My Aunt Mara, who passed away last week, is a perfect example. My direct interactions with her as the mother of my closest cousin primarily encompassed the first two decades of my life. By this time in my memory, her life was primarily defined by her ailing health. The suffering of WWII was rarely discussed, and I only knew tangentially of her young adult years, primarily through photos I occasionally glimpsed which, in my imagination, strung together different stories of her life before her body betrayed her. For example, despite their very different personalities, she joined her older sister, Irene, as part of an acrobatic duo, a vaudevillian act in the post-war years. This must have been quite a stretch for her as she was definitely the less outgoing and animated of the two.

After arriving in America, I saw photos of her and my uncle Werner living the quintessential 1950s life in black and white photos with deckled edges. In one, they stand beside the large, shiny body of an American-made car full of pride. In another, they are dancing close together in an era when dance halls, ballroom music, and cocktails dominated the social scene. They enjoyed dancing and excelled, or so I heard, and must have been quite a sight on the dance floor as he was over six feet and she under five. In each still picture, Aunt Mara had her jet black hair slicked back in a chignon on the nape of her neck. She wore heels and impeccable suits or dresses tight on her small waist with full skirts. Her lips wore paint, and she added sunglasses or pearls or scarves or hats to her ensembles. Her entire look was reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn.

In contrast years later, when I stayed at my aunt’s house to play with my cousin or spend the night, I often remember her in pain, laying on the couch in a housecoat and watching her favorite soap opera. Still, I know she instilled in me an appreciation of some of her fineries in life that relate directly back to the Kodak stories. I simply love a good dress and retain a penchant for pearls. I love coffee which she often served from a china pot in cup and saucer with cream in a creamer and sugar in a covered sugar dish to be stirred quietly with small, silver spoons. She introduced me to soft-boiled eggs and taught me how to eat them from egg cups, a set of which I now store in my own kitchen cupboards.  She made large dumplings unlike anyone else I knew, especially in a dish called Königsberger Klopse. She prepared beautiful tortes for Kaffee und Kuchen on the weekends. I remember the mocha and hazelnut tortes in particular and know the seeds of my love of European bakeries and delicacies from my own hands took root, in part, in her kitchen.  Again and again, my memories include the smell of lilacs and the taste of ripe raspberries, gooseberries, and currants which grew on the bushes around her home.

However, my most vivid memories took place in Aunt Mara’s basement which housed a reel-to-reel music player of big band music, including songs like Begin the Beguine, Sentimental Journey, and Some Enchanted Evening. My cousin and I would don her old ballet costumes and create elaborate stories for ourselves under the most exotic pseudonyms we could think of like Manuela and Katarina. The storylines always included romance and tragedy and were acted out with great drama. My aunt and uncle watched numerous scenes as we danced to the music and swung round and round the metal support poles in the center of the basement. I am not sure if Aunt Mara saw a bit of herself in our performances, but I know I saw a part of myself in her as the music moved us or when, on occasion, she laughed fully and uninhibited at our antics.

I grew up and my life moved on to new places and experiences, but I return to Aunt Mara’s house often in my mind. A second home for some very formative years, she fed me delicacies as well as doses of security and spurred the imagination and esteem of a very shy, reserved child. Over the years, I have journeyed down a very different road far from my childhood home to write my own string of stories. Aunt and niece, we never knew each other completely, but for a period of time we knew pieces of each other intimately. Such connections shape us forever and give life such fullness and color to complete our own quilt. As I see it, living life in relationship to other remains one of its greatest gifts for which I thank you, dear aunt.

Trees

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited. (31) Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

No doubt we are about to enter the time of year when we see the world through the colorful leaves of a tree. Truth be told, I have seen the world through the lives of trees throughout my life. I remember planting trees with my dad as a child, when one maple in particular was planted just for me. I also spent many days of my childhood, playing beneath the weeping branches of four large willows that thrived in the often wet, low-lying reaches of the backyard. Willows are so great for imaginative play!

I walked the lake shore path more times than I can count on my way from my dorm to classes and back again my freshman and sophomore years of college in Madison, and I awakened to love in spring beneath the large oaks that lined Bascom Hill, fed a thriving squirrel population, and towered over pairs of college students soaking in the sun's rays as winter broke and pheromones rushed anew. Once a tree toppled in a storm in St. Paul and almost crushed my sister-in-law's car.

My older daughter hugged trees repeatedly as a toddler walking around the neighborhood and parks of Boston, and both girls buried each other in fallen leaves from the numerous, mature trees on our property in State College. My younger daughter and I collected enormous acorns each day on our walk home from elementary school in Ithaca. We stuffed our pockets to overflowing, filled any number of jars and hurricanes, and strung them with beads as decoration which I still keep in the basement in a plastic bin marked Seasonal Decor.

Now, I am taking a tree class offered by the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards. I am learning how much I don't know about trees and meeting some of the dedicated people who study and care for them in my new home. The class is a place to meet new people, explore my new surroundings, and connect with nature to renew the spirit. A walk through the old growth forest of Montpelier on one of the first cool and foggy mornings of autumn will never be forgotten.

Tony Russell, Master Naturalist with the Virginia Native Plant Society, summed up trees so eloquently:

In our paved, constructed, developed culture, we sometimes need to remind ourselves that trees are our living relatives--very distant relatives, but nonetheless fellow beings with whom we share not only history but genes, DNA, and fundamental life experiences. Like us, they are born, they live, and they die. They breathe in and out, they have circulations, they suffer injuries and sicknesses, they have sex lives and offspring, they respond to light and dark and cold and heat and hunger and thirst. They are both individuals and part of communities. If we have the feeling, when we enter a woods or forest, that we are at home, it's because, in some deep and calming way, we are. We are entering our ancestral home, surrounded by distant, beneficent kin who are quietly tending and nourishing the world.

I think of this often when out in nature as climate change wrecks havoc on the delicate balance of the biodiversity of a particular ecosystem, and I know my species is to blame. I know we would all benefit from seeing the world more often from the vantage point of a tree. If you are game, you might enjoy reading Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. I just loved this memoir which juxtaposes chapters on the author's life to becoming an acclaimed, female biologist with chapters on what science now knows about trees, the awe-inspiring, puzzling, and urgent. Most importantly, th prose on trees is deeply moving and poetic.

Of course, you might like something shorter and more concise on trees. My only recommendation is to simply be with a tree, up close and personal or immersed in text written about trees. Both are revelatory. You might start with Merwin, who also echoes my sentiment as trees have many fellow admirers:

Elegy for a Walnut Tree

W.S. Merwin

Old friend now there is no one alive

who remembers when you were young

it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world