Red Sky in Morning ...

It's never a good sign to wake up to this view outside your window. And, yes, in case you were wondering, the heavens did open up and flood my basement. Again.

Let the Sun Shine

Ten straight days of rain and one flooded basement later, the sun has finally emerged. Hallelujah! I was starting to feel a bit like Noah in his ark here, all cooped up in doors with an infant, a toddler, a dog and a cat and the floodwaters rising all around me. We are all in great need of some sunshine and a little drying out--especially my poor garden.

I know rain is good for the garden, but this relentless downpour has wrecked havoc on mine. The "lawn" has grown a good six inches and the weeds a solid foot, and I never managed to plant my lettuces or my flower boxes. I have six packs of geraniums, verbena, and ... that have been sitting around and waiting to be planted for a month now. Where does the time go?

So, when the sun finally emerged yesterday at 7:00 p.m., I told the husband and children to fend for themselves, and I went straight out to work in the garden for a few hours and soak up the sunshine. Amen.

In the bleak midwinter

Oh, is it cold! For over two weeks now the mercury hasn't risen above -25 C. Even by Edmonton standards, this is extreme weather for so early in the season, and it makes me fearful for what horrors January has in store for us. I've lived through one of Edmonton's notorious deep freezes, but then I was unemployed and never had to leave my house. Now I actually have to go out in it, and walk the dog, and walk to my bus stop -- and wait at my bus stop! Fortunately, I'm on holiday for the next seven days, but that doesn't excuse me from having to walk the dog.

Although the snow starts to burn his paws after about 20 minutes, Remy still wants his daily walk. (We tried getting him some of those little dog booties, but he went berserk when we put them on, went tearing off into the woods at the dog park, and promptly lost two of them.) At least now that we are home all day, we can go while the sun is still shining and take advantage of the few extra degrees of warmth it provides. There's also something to be said for how, in these dark days of midwinter, that little bit of sunshine raises your spirits, even as the cold saps your strength. Invariably, after the walk, we all immediately collapse into a deep sleep, but even that is more pleasant when you have a colorful new German felt blanket -- a Christmas surprise from Kevin -- to curl up in.

Deep Freeze

Do you know what negative 35 Celsius feel like? No, I don't either, because I'm not stupid enough to go out in such weather, but my physicist-husband does, and he says, "It'll freeze your balls off."

For the past week Edmonton has been experiencing extreme winter temperatures: negative 35 Celsius during the day and as low as negative 44 at night. For those of you, like me, who are a little unfamiliar with the Celsius scale, that's about the level at which Celsius and Fahrenheit intersect.

Prior to moving to Canada, the coldest weather I had ever experienced was in the negative single digits (Fahrenheit, that is, or about -10 Celsius), and I broke that record on my very first day in Edmonton. On that day, New Year's Day, Kevin attempted to walk the three blocks to Chinatown to get some lunch. About a block into our journey we had to turn back: My hands and feet were throbbing with pain; my lips were so numb that I couldn't talk; and even though I was wearing a wool hat, the metal posts in my earrings were so cold, it felt like someone was shoving daggers in my ears. I was surprised to learn later that it had been only negative 15 that day.

I have since experienced many days of minus-15 temperatures, but I'm no longer so foolish as to try to walk anywhere in such weather. When I do go outside, it's only to rush to the car and drive to my destination, even if I'm only going a few blocks away. And I always make sure to dress in long john's and a fur-lined coat, with several extra layers of clothing in between.

Yes, living through my first Edmonton winter has been a real education. For instance, did you know that when it gets this cold, you have to plug in the block heater on your car for an hour or two before you can drive it? I didn't even know what a "block heater" was until this week, nor did I know that my car had one. Fortunately for us, our landlord Jack stopped by at the beginning of the cold spell and filled us in on this little secret. Apparently, if you don't heat up the fuel in your engine before you turn on your car, the fuel line will explode. Or something like that. Jack learned that lesson the hard way his very first winter in Edmonton.

Also, did you know that when it's this cold outside, the birds don't feed and the mail doesn't run? Canadian birds -- and mail carriers -- are a hardy lot, but minus 35 is too cold even for them.

When it's this cold outside, all the moisture in the house freezes to the windowpanes. You can't bath regularly for fear of losing precious natural oils, and you can forget about washing your hair. It will just break off. When it's this cold outside and there's no moisture in the house, you wake up every morning with a nosebleed.

But remarkably, when it's this cold outside, you can still open your door in the middle of the day wearing nothing but your bathroom and slippers. I did this at about noon yesterday, to see if the mail had come. (It had not.) I hadn't been able to see out my windows in days (as they were covered in a thick sheet of ice), and I was surprised to find that the sun shining brightly, so brightly in fact that the heat reflecting off the snow created an intense mirage effect, just like you see in the desert, in the movies. I knew it had to be at least negative 30 outside, but the radiant heat on my face felt like a warm spring day, and there was only the slightest breeze on my ankles. But Fanny, the kitten, who has never been out of doors, was horrified by all the white and cold and brightness, and she raised her hackles and insisted I close the door immediately, and so I did.

I have since learned that negative 35 is cold, even by Edmonton standards. Kevin's boss said that this has been the coldest winter he's experienced in the ten years he's lived here. Great, I thought. So glad we didn't miss it. "But don't worry," said Gina, our landlord, who's lived here much longer. "It never lasts more than a couple of weeks."

The Color Purple

Epiphany. Twelfth Night. Dreikönigstag. Whatever you call it, the sixth of January is synonymous with the color purple. At least in my mind it is. Maybe it's because, as acolytes, we always wore purple robes on on this Sunday. Royal purple for the Christ child, or was it for the "three kings of orient"? I can't remember, but I remember that color purple. It was my favorite color when I was a girl -- the favorite color of all little girls, I suspect -- and consequently, Epiphany Sunday was my favorite Sunday of the year.

Instead of worshiping in a proper sanctuary this morning, I headed out to a garden center on the outskirts of town, my preferred place of worship. Back in Boston, Sunday was always the day my best friend Sarah and I would make our pilgrimage to Russell's Garden Center in Wayland -- the Mecca of garden centers. Sarah and I share a first name and a love of all things green, and so it was a little sad today to be making this trek without her.

To make matters worse, garden centers are pretty sad places in Edmonton in January. Few of them open their doors between October and May, when the greenhouses are all shut up, but those that do stock little more than a few forlorn houseplants and old Christmas greenery. However, after a week of seeing nothing but white, I'm hungry for a little green ... and a little red and yellow and blue if they have any.

Today I was on a mission for bulbs: red Amaryllis, yellow daffodils, Dutch blue hyacinths, etc. Bulbs are the miracle of winter: For an ugly onion-like thing to produce such a riot of color and fragrance during the darkest months of the year, with nothing but a little soil and some water, is nothing short of divine.

But the sales assistant told me I was out of luck: "All the bulbs were bought up back in December." December, when, if I had so much as thought about buying bulbs, it would have caused an international incident, moving as I was from Germany to the States and then to Canada. And so goes another year without bulbs.

Sensing my disappointment, the salewoman added hopefully, "I might have some dwarf iris in the back." And indeed, she returned a moment later with a little four-inch pot of dwarf iris, their pale green shoots barely poking out of the dirt. They're not much to look at now, but I know that in a week or two their buds will open up like "purple butterflies," as Beverley Nichols, another lover of irises, described them. "And the winged petals, so delicately folded, throbbed in the sunlight, that filtered through their green casings, and the purple deepened, and their myriad eyes of tawny gold opened wider and wider (A Village in a Valley, 1934)."

Irises, even the dwarf varieties, are one of the few flowers that bloom that deep, ecclesiastical purple, and so, consequently, they were my favorite flower when I was a little girl. Although my preference might have had something to do with the fact that they always seemed to bloom just in time for my birthday in late April, and my mother would always set out a big vase full of them on that day, just for me. Whatever the reason, it seems a miracle to have this token of spring on my desk all January long, while outside the landscape is a blur of white.

"So this is Christmas ..."

I was sorry that we didn’t stay in Germany for the Christmas holidays. I had long wanted to see how Christmas, or Weihnachten, is celebrated in its country of origin. The Tennenbaum, the Yule log, the Weihnachtsman (a.k.a. Santa Claus), they’re all German inventions, and though Germany has not been unaffected by the American commercialization of Christmas, its Christmas traditions still have that simple, rustic, and almost Dickensian feel.

Christmas in Germany seems to be all about family, High Mass, Lebkuchen (gingerbread) and Gluhwein (mulled wine). My German friends – my contemporaries – tell me of Christmas Eve nights, coming home from Mass to find the Tennenbaum decorated for the very first time, all aglow with little candles and Christmas Eve goose cooling on the table. “God bless us, every one,” you can almost hear the littlest of them say.

Although I didn’t stay for Christmas proper, I saw the next best thing: the famous German Weihnachtsmarkt. From about the first of December right up until Christmas Eve, the market square of every German town is given over to the Christmas markets. Almost over night, dozens of rustic huts sprout up in neat little rows in order to sell candles and baubles, soaps and spices, and other things nobody needs.

At the Weihnachtsmarkt in Stuttgart, the merchants seemed as competitive in decorating their huts as in hawking their wares. Their roofs practically sagged under the weight of all the evergreen, the veritable forests of fir trees, the positive herds of deer. No multi-colored strings of blinking lights or giant inflatable Santa Clauses for these guys. Anything not au naturale would have seemed kitschy, no doubt.

I was enchanted. There is something magical about all the green and red during the coldest, grayest months of the year. December in Germany is particularly depressing. It rains nearly every day, and the sun refuses to make an appearance for weeks on end. But just as I was feeling I might throw myself off the Festung or drown myself in the Main, the city lit up with that warm holiday glow. I got the sense the most of these Christmas traditions arose out of some communal need to combat rampant melancholia.

So, despite the freezing rain, I visited the Würzburg Weihnachtsmarkt nearly every day. I’d wander through the stalls, fingering the brightly embroidered linens or gazing into mercury glass balls, not buying any, of course, just soaking up all that color and texture and light. I also soaked up enough hot, tangy Gluhwein and sugared almonds that you could can and preserve me, but that’s another thing altogether. Needless to say, these cheery marketplaces got me through my last weeks in Germany, until I could get home to my own family and our own Christmas traditions.

Equivalents

From the 1920s to the 1930s, the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz took pictures of clouds compusively. A dozen or so of these images became part of his famous Equivalent series, the culmination of his artistic endeavors and aesthetic ideals. We had several of these prints in the museum where I used to work, and I was surprised to learn that they were some of the most valuable of the museum’s extensive photography collection. Yet shuffling through them, whenever I was working in the “Se-Su” box, I was always completely uninspired. The images were a little grainy, the paper was as thin as tissue paper, and anyway the subject matter seemed cliché and a little embarrassing – like all those inspirational photographs of clouds and sunsets that accompany biblical quotations.

Now suddenly, after several months in Germany, I find myself taking pictures of clouds, compulsively. Fluffy behemoths of cumulonimbus and lost little lambs of altocumulus, mostly. And unlike Stieglitz, I can capture, with my little Leica digital camera, their stunning array of colors: bone china, dove gray, sand dune, rose petal, etc. They’re just not like American clouds at all – at least not the fleecy gray blanket of stratus that forever hangs over Boston. I also wonder if there’s not some scientific explanation – like a difference in weather patterns – that produces qualitatively different clouds on the Continent than in North America.

I feel like I never saw clouds before until I saw European clouds. I know there must have been clouds in my childhood in Arkansas, but I can’t actually remember any. It’s like that retrospective amnesia that Nabokov described in his autobiography Speak, Memory regarding his own famous obsession with Lepidoptera. He remembers with striking detail discovering his first butterfly, a yellow Swallowtail, at the age of seven, but preceding that date, “I fail to make out one wing, one wing beat, one azure flash, one moth-gemmed flower, as if an evil spell had been cast on the Adriatic coast making all its ‘leps’ … invisible.”


I don’t want to take this theme too far, though. I’m not going to switch careers and become a meteorologist. And my photographs of clouds will not be making it into any museums. I’m not trying to make art here, just record a moment in time during my European odyssey when I looked up at the sky and saw something wonderful, something that inspired a particular feeling – but not some a treacly come-to-Jesus moment. I have since discovered that that’s actually what Stieglitz was after. His clouds were meant to be the “equivalent” to a particular feeling, be it a memory of a beloved woman, a childish enthusiasm, or what have you, and he hoped that by using an abstract yet dramatic subject matter, his photographs could convey that exact feeling without setting off a whole bunch on unrelated associations, as they would if they depicted a particular woman or a particular child.

Coincidentally, in researching Stieglitz this morning, I learned that though he is classified as an American photographer, he was actually of German descent and spent more than a decade in Germany during his late teens and early twenties. I now wonder if maybe all those cloud pictures he made toward the end of his life weren’t also some vain attempt to recall the continental clouds of his youth – there being no such American equivalent.

Fall comes to Franconia

Although I harbored doubt all week, today it was unmistakable: Fall is fully here. At first I thought it was merely the start of the commercial Fall, that artificial season heralded in by the changing of the department store windows rather than by the changing of the leaves. But this year the two seem to have synchronized: The stores rolled out their inventories of warm clothing just as one started to think about needing them.

Similarly, the parks along the Main are now empty of their sunbathing lovers, and there are no more naked children splashing around with the geese on the riverbanks near Randersacker. It’s not yet too cold to go in the water, but mentally the time for it has passed. The thermometer hovers between 17 and 20 degrees Celsius (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit), which, by the Boston standard to which I’ve become accustomed, is still positively balmy, but the Franconians are a Southern people, and like Southern people the world over, they bundle up in sweaters and scarves at the first hint of cooler temperatures.

The transformation to the countryside has been a clearer sign that Fall is here, farmers knowing more about the changing of the seasons than anyone else, I guess. In just the last week all the corn has been harvested, the fields tilled, and every last apple has been plucked from the trees. Pumpkins and squash have replaced the Zwetchgen (small, oval-shaped plums) at the roadside produce stands. And in Kleinen Oechsenfurt today, the villagers were already testing out their fireplaces.

There’s something about the smell of burning leaves and pine logs that takes me back to the autumns of my childhood in Warren, Arkansas. I guess it’s because in the years since I’ve never lived someplace where people had fireplaces or where burning leaves in your backyard was allowed. One whiff of that pungent peppery scent and I felt the urge to don a calico dress and harvest something, like in all those make-believe games of “Pioneer” that my friends and I used to play when we were girls and only in the Autumn. And fittingly, I heard a marching band playing today in Winterhausen – a sound that I always associate with Fall and football. I don’t suppose I’ve heard a marching band in a decade or picked up a French horn in as many years. I should.

Fall in the country is just so much more intense than Fall in the city. In Boston I was rarely affected by the change in the seasons. There was so little Nature there to affect, that I rarely even noticed until a heat wave made my apartment uninhabitable or a Nor’easter covered the roads with four feet of snow. When I left Boston last year for Würzburg, I was so worried about all the things in the city that I would miss: museums, concerts, restaurants, shopping. It hadn’t even occurred to me that living in the city, I lacked anything from the country, like brilliant seasons. Likewise, when Kevin and I first found out that we’d be moving to Alberta, I was a little concerned. Although we’d be living in a city, Edmonton is an oasis of civilization in a vast wilderness more rural than anywhere I’ve ever known. However, I’m now beginning to think that it will have its own compensations and it may even grow to be a way of life I prefer.

"Spring is bursting out all over!"

After a winter of cold, miserable rain, Spring has officially come to this corner of the world. Two solid weeks of warm weather have coaxed the tulips and cherry blossoms into bloom and convinced the citizens of Würzburg to shed their puffy winter jackets for good – and with them, their brusque, business-like manner. Germans are supposedly the hardest-working people in all of Europe, but you wouldn’t know it to look around here. By 2 p.m., the Altstadt is packed with visitors to the recently opened farmers’ market. And there’s not a single patio seat to be had in any bar or restaurant, where the locals linger for hours over a cup of coffee or a gelato.

On the streets, the energy is palpable, and after such a quiet, dreary winter, it makes me want to dance about and burst into song, like the characters in some Broadway musical. My current fav is “Spring is Bursting Out All Over” from Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” although I sound like a strangled cat when trying to hit the high note on the “ooh-o-ver.” And watching the townspeople cross the old stone bridge over the River Main on their way to work every morning, just as they’ve done for hundreds of years, always makes me want to break into the opening number from Disney’s "Beauty and the Beast" (“There goes the baker with his tray like always, the same old bread and rolls to sell…”).

I’m trying to soak up as much of the beautiful weather as possible, since the next couple of years will probably be the coldest years of my life. Kevin has accepted a faculty position at the University of Alberta, and in January, we’ll take up residence in Edmonton, where Winter stretches into May and temperatures routinely drop below zero degrees – Fahrenheit! I’m sanguine about it. I figure if I’ve survived Boston’s wind and Würzburg’s rain, then cold is just one more element that can be conquered. And after all, weather is only ever temporary, and sometimes a long wait makes the Spring seem all the more beautiful.

Sunny day ...

A few minutes after my train pulled away from the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof today, I looked out of my window to see a young man standing alone in the middle of an empty field. His car was parked a few meters away, and the driver’s side door was left open, as if he’d exited in a rush.

As the train drew nearer, I could see that he was playing the violin -- passionately.

I assumed that he had been compelled to practice on the outskirts of town because of his apartment's strict Hausordnung (house rules), which forbid the playing of musical instruments indoors, along with just about anything else you might ever want to do. Perhaps this empty field is his practice room, I thought, where he comes everyday to play, uninterrupted, for hours and hours.

However, it's just as likely that he has a perfectly good practice room at his disposal, but that today, while driving down the Autobahn, he was so overcome by the beauty of this particular sunny day (a rarity in Germany in winter), that he felt compelled to pull over and play a hymn of praise to the sun gods.

After a solid week without sunlight, this one radiant afternoon was certainly the answer to my prayers.

Windstürme

The gods must be angry with us! Europe (and Germany in particular) has been pummeled by terrible windstorms for the past three days. The German Weather Service has reported gusts of over 120 mph in our region, and yesterday the transportation authorities canceled all flights and train service within Germany. Fortunately, I made it home from class in Frankfurt before the worst of it and so avoided getting stranded, but Kevin and I have not been entirely unaffected.

Early Thursday morning when the storms started up, we were jerked from our sleep by the most awful crash –- doors slamming in every direction, and papers flying all over. I woke up screaming from the shock. It felt like we were being sucked right out of the apartment. As it turns out, I had merely failed to lock the window in the kitchen, and it had flown open, shattering a potted plant and some coffee cups against the wall and making a soggy, muddy mess on the floor. But even after cleaning up, I couldn’t go back to sleep. It reminded me too much of the tornado that passed through my Little Rock neighborhood in January of 1999, moving whole homes off their foundations. Although Kevin promised me that they don’t have tornados in Europe, I wasn’t satisfied.

All night long, our apartment building, one of the tallest in Würzburg, swayed like a ship, and the wind, forcing its way through invisible crevices in the walls, howled. Our sturdy new storm windows looked like they would rattle right off their hinges, which frightened me to no end, as our apartment is all windows –- a pleasant-enough arrangement in fair weather, but terrifying when the weather turns bad.

I am doing much better today, though. This morning I made my way to the train station as usual, only to discover that service was still suspend, and so I had the day off from school! Now, I’m curled up in my little crow’s nest reading Wuthering Heights. The wind has died down a little, and even the sun looks like it might peek out later in the day. So now I’m contenting myself by imagining “heaven’s happiness” as young Cathy does: “rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing.” She makes it sound so appealing that I may even take my reading out onto the balcony this afternoon.