Fruits of Insanity

Germany: On Windows and Grandparents

My sister, Madeline, lives in Germany. A long way—hours and hours so that when we talk, our days are her nights. She lives there with her husband, who plays in a US military band, and three children.

The youngest was born in Germany, a little boy named Thomas after his grandfather. He is walking and talking now, in English although German shapes his ears to its sound. His sister, June, the oldest, is eight and has a difficult time reading in English because of her time in German school. Carter in the middle (his father is Carter, too) is finishing his first year of German school.

Madeline teaches them English at home. She tries to learn German so that she can help them with their homework and so they don’t have a secret language beyond that of children, which adults forget eventually. I remember when we spoke that secret language together, although she was nine years younger than me and more proficient as I learned to forget it.

Their father’s grandmother recently died, too quickly to make it back to the states to say goodbye or go to the funeral. That was a relief a few days later when Madeline called us on a Sunday evening (or three o’clock in their Monday morning) because Thomas was screaming with earache. And then he suddenly stopped and she Facetimed the gunk that was draining from his ear, and we all knew that his eardrum had ruptured, but it might be okay. We were so far away, but still the people she thought of first in crisis. It goes back to family, ultimately.

My mother’s mother’s mother’s father was German. A Hessian soldier who stopped in Ohio and married and took up farming. His picture is on the wall above the piano with dark eyes and a nose that reminds me of my brother—a window through time into my present.

I think of Madeline and her family often. She sent a picture that another sister (Rose, who is the youngest) turned into a painting that hangs over our fireplace. I look at the painting of a cottage surrounded by greenery behind a hedge of white branches like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and it’s like I’m looking through a window into Madeline’s life—or the life that I imagine occurs in a little German town, not far from the base. Quiet and friendly and magical with all the necessities of modern living in a cottage that is older than America. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how it feels to me.

I associate fairy tales with Germany. That’s where the Brothers Grimm lived and gathered tales from the little towns through the Black Forest that makes me think of chocolate and cherries but was originally where the wolves roamed, finding little children in red cloaks on their way to grandmother’s house. It must be nice to have a German grandmother. They would be warm and old and so full of stories that the dark places couldn’t swallow them forever.

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