Road Trip with Mother

 

A couple of weeks ago I returned from a week-long road trip I took together with my 87-yr-old mother. It had been my birthday present to her for her last birthday to organize a trip with/for her, bringing her to northern Germany to visit my father’s grave, to go see her 90-yr-old sister and a college friend of hers in Husum and Kiel, and just generally spend a few days together. Our relationship has never been an easy one, and although it had been my idea to give her this present, I was not sure how well we would do along the way. But we did fine. It’s been years since we spent that long a time together, and only the two of us!

First, I brought her north by train and we spent a couple of days in Ratzeburg. 

This may have been taken at a station, 
but honestly, I can't remember...

 

Then we continued by car, going to Husum on the North Sea, where her sister lives, and visited for an afternoon. We stayed in a hotel and then continued across Schleswig-Holstein, stopping in Schleswig for a look into the Schleswig Cathedral.

The altar in Schleswig Cathedral is famous: 
carved wood with so many details, 
our brief stop really did not give us
enough time to take it all in.

 

Afterwards we continued to Kiel (famous for the annual sailing event Kieler Woche, and location of the 1972 Olympics Sailing), where my mother had studied pharmacy in the early Sixties after a first semester further south. There we met her friend and visited for an afternoon, again spending the night in a hotel.

In the morning we delayed our departure because my mother was curious to see the harbor bridge opening for passage of ships moored beyond. 

A bit of serendipity here with the gull I managed to 
catch on the photo, although it doesn't take a whole 
lot of luck for that in the harbor, there are so 
many gulls around, making for a full sound panorama.

 

Then we returned to Ratzeburg for a couple more days, taking a round trip on the  lake by steamboat,

 

It's my dream that we will one day have a sailboat here on the lake...

visiting with friends and relatives, and even getting to see the lunar eclipse. We sat on the pier of the rowing club patiently, waiting for the appearance of the already-eclipsed moon just after sundown and were surprised when it finally was visible that it appeared further ‘to the left’ than we had expected. But it had been hidden by hazy clouds to begin with.

By the time we finally saw the moon the full eclipse was over. 

 We had a lovely time chatting with the friends who had come with us, and it wasn't even cool, so sitting out in the beginnings of the night was not a problem.

The next day I took her back to southern Germany where she lives alone in my parents’ house, now that my father has passed away. 

The journey taught me a lot about how little hotels and public realms are prepared for people with special needs. A public restroom on the island of Nordstrand, if you did not park your car for several days and paid for parking, required climbing up and down the dike plus a considerable distance, and only stairs available. Despite the fact that I had announced that one of us came with a walker when making reservations at the hotels, one room was definitely on the edge of too narrow to navigate. Both hotels were not well prepared for supplying a little stool to use in the shower. And breakfast arrangements were not such that my mother could go and pick her food for herself because it would not have been possible to navigate the food display area with a walker.

We managed. But it made me feel very sad to learn so directly about the difficulties my mother is facing in her life now, and these ones I mentioned are not all of them.

Before she came, she had unearthed some very early ‘artworks’ of mine, from art education or art activities, that had been hidden in some storage in the house. One of them I still remembered actively: we were supposed to transform an impressionist painting by Claude Monet into a woodcut. I don’t remember whether we were learning about impressionism at that time (somehow I don’t think so, because we weren’t learning much about art history, if I recall correctly), but I do remember that I found the task very difficult, and for years I had been wondering what the teacher’s intention was. I had no idea that my mother had kept the print.

Looking at it now I think I did a pretty good job indeed, and I may keep it.

 Of course, it doesn't take long nowadays to find which painting of Monet's most likely was the original we worked from - I would assume it was this one, "Gare St. Lazare" (and of course, the wood print is reversed because I hadn't thought about the fact that when printing a wood-cut the image would be 'the other way around', so I also assume the teacher didn't tell us, again: what was he thinking?) 

The other pieces I recognized upon seeing but would not have been able to recall actively if asked about my early years’ ‘art production’, and I consider them less worthy of mentioning or keeping. But it gave me a connection to my teenage years of creativity, which I had always remembered as ‘I was always making/doing something’ (mostly knitting and other handicrafts). Still regret that I didn’t really take up the pen to draw. Several attempts since have stalled soon after. Amongst my mother’s findings also was a 330-page (handwritten) novel I wrote when I was around 11, at that time still thinking I would be a famous author. That has gone into the bin unread and uninspected. I had the stamina to write it, admirable for an 11-yr-old, but it was not a good story!