Raising the Tree

Labour Day is a national holiday in Austria. However, unlike in Vienna and other European cities, where May Day is very much a celebration of the Labour movement, Salzburg largely still holds to the tradition of Maibaumaufstellen. Translated frequently as May pole festival, this means, literally, ‘May tree set up’.

We were still settling in last year on May Day, so we missed the festivals. For weeks afterward, as we toured the neighbouring area, we’d occasionally pass the tall bare poles, with greenery still wrapped round its height, red and white ribbons still fluttering. But how it worked or what the festivals entailed was vague to me. I still had images, I suppose, of dancing flower-decked maidens weaving satin streamers round the pole.

So Sunday morning, when I located a May pole celebration online, Himself and I left promptly. I didn’t want to miss the main event, which I understood started at 1 p.m. Sure, I knew, there would be beer and wurstl, and people milling around in bright coloured trachten, all afternoon; that’s to be expected. But I wanted to see what the May pole celebration itself entailed.

We cycled along the river and, south of Kapuzinerberg, turned east, toward the sloping foothills to the pretty village of Aigen, where a picturesque church – remodelled in the Baroque style in 1698 – rises over a broad green field. A few cars were parked along the edge of the green, and stalls selling beer, grilled meats and sausages, cakes and pastries, and coffee and tea had been set up. A brass band was settling in too. And away, at a corner of the field, hitched to small blue tractor, an enormous tree lay on its side, supported midway along by a gun carriage. A couple of dozen men, members of der Historischen Prangerstutzenschützen, the club sponsoring the Maibaumaufstellen, milled around it. They wore their club uniform of traditional velvet vests, leather jacket and felt hats. And, just as we rolled our bikes to a halt, a volley of shots from huge blunderbusses erupted. The celebrations were just barely beginning.

It was a cloudy day; rain was predicted, and it hung heavily in the grey clouds. It was a day when Ireland seemed no farther than the next field, beyond the thick line of mature trees so intensely green they coloured the very air. But looking up the field, past the row of stalls, the church with its onion-domed steeple could not be mistaken. Nor could the people, the women in dirndls and men in lederhosen, worn with the casually, with the insouciance with which jeans are worn in Southern California – or anywhere in America or in Ireland, for that matter. (In Ireland, I suppose, you would substitute track suits for jeans.)

We debated getting something to eat then, as 1 p.m. approached, or waiting until after the action was over. We were hungry, so we got some grilled chops with vinegary potato salad and slaw and chose seats at one of the many, mostly empty, tables. Near us, a group of young men in the careless assortment of lederhosen and heavy shoes and socks paired with tee-shirts and casual jackets, laughed and joked over beer and cigarettes. No one paid any attention to the group gathered around the tractor and tree.

But soon the tractor started rolling slowly toward the open centre of the field. Behind it, the members of der Historischen Prangerstutzenschützen formed an honour guard along side the tree. I jumped up with my camera, anxious to see all there was to see. Still, no one else stirred.

The tree, about two feet in diameter at its base, stretched over 100 feet long. Stripped of its bark, it shone a pale cream colour to its top, with was still covered with branches and green, like a diminutive Christmas tree at the tip of a long, tapering spike. Around the bare trunk were wound spirals of green decorated with streaming red and white ribbons. Circling the trunk, like twin rings of Saturn, were two wreaths of green suspended by wires. Midway between the highest of the wreaths and the tiny green top, broad stripes of red and white wrapped around the pole.

The tractor pulled the base of the tree toward a deep narrow trench at the top of the field, and slowly, very slowly, the men began inching the supports under the thick trunk backwards, so the base could be tilted into the trench. By now, I had begun to see that my anxiety not to miss anything had been unnecessary. Little did I know at the time it would take the 40 or so men over three hours to raise the tree fully upright.

Once the tractor was removed, they worked without any motorised lifts or support. Through a carefully choreographed process of supporting the trunk with large beams, they gradually shifted the gun carriage backward. As the treetop rose, inch by careful inch, they supported it with beams linked by heavy-gage chains that formed a kind of cradle in which it rested. They were directed in this by a kind of drum major, a man with a baton formed of a stick from which fluttered red and white streamers. Around the men holding the beams swarmed other men, some with long poles topped with a twin-spiked fork they jammed into the tree to reposition the chains, to add additional support and to mark the place that chains should go. Every so often the drum major would bark a command, the men would shove their weight into the beams, they would strain for a few seconds, the tree would rise, almost imperceptibly, and then they would rest.

Tied to their task, they stood in knots at various points along the ever rising tree, smoking and laughing at times. Occasionally others would bring them beers, ham-sized fists clutching the handles four or five heavy mugs in each hand. Desserts were brought out, too, which were eaten in some cases one handed, as the supports were held in place.

Around them swirled the crowd, eating, talking, drinking beer or soda or coffee, the children in their trachten standing at the edge waiting. About two hours into the process, the rain began, and the shoulders of the men’s leather jackets darkened with wet. Umbrellas bloomed in all colours over the watching crowd. Still the raising continued.

At last, though, sometime past 4 p.m., the tree stood erect and the twin wreaths of green swung around the posts levelly. Smaller logs were brought and a big, red-faced man grunted as he hammered them into the trench, firmly securing the tree. A chain saw was brought out to cut the logs even with the ground; I held my breath at each stroke, envisioning a slash across the trunk so laboriously put upright.

Now the fun for which the children had waited begun. A thick orange mat, like a donut, was put into position around the base of the trunk and children danced on it as the clamoured around the tree. A girl of about 10 put her arms around the base as others lifted her feet, trying to hoist her up.

Then a young man of about 20 stepped forward. Standing bareheaded in the light rain, he was stripped of his shirt, shoes and stockings. He had wet the front of his lederhosen, apparently to give them added traction against the smooth surface of the tree. But the rain had done its damage; the tree was too slippery and he could get no purchase.

One after another they tried. No one got more than a few feet up. One man, who approached it from the far side of where I stood, clung to it, arms and legs wrapped tight like bracelets, about 10 feet off the ground. Then he let go and dropped to the mat.

Austria it seems, is home to robust ambitions. The object here is not to dance around a pole with coloured streamers. No, here the goal is to erect a sturdy, tall tree and then climb it. And, perhaps, someone managed to reach as high as the dangling rings later in the evening. As for us, we collected our bikes and, sodden through and through, cycled back along the river and home.

Seed

It has been exactly a year since we moved into the flat by the wood. Last year, summer was upon us before we’d settled in, so we hadn’t a chance, it seemed, to indulge in the neighbourhood’s rituals of spring. It was all we could do to tame the lawn, left unmowed too long, never mind beginning a garden or putting out window boxes.

This year, though, we have time to take it in spring in this Salzburg neighbourhood: The faint green veil cast over the budding trees, the white clouds of blossom cloaking the magnolias and, especially, the bursts of brilliant yellow forsythia against the greening fields.

Here at the flat, we’re preparing for summer. We’ve been turning the plot in the corner of the garden. Last weekend I put seeds in containers – for coriander (cilantro), basil and leeks – and set them in front of a window in the sun. And Saturday, we picked up small containers of geraniums for the window boxes.

Strictly speaking, I suppose, these are not window boxes. Jacob, the craftsman who built this house, and whose ghost, I say, still haunts us, was not one to do things the pedestrian way. The window boxes that go with this flat don’t sit in front of windows, for a start. They slip into the curved ovoid openings in the otherwise solid balustrade that surrounds our first-story veranda.

Nor are they, strictly speaking, boxes. Rather, Jacob replicated the convex-concave silhouette of the openings (like a double-ended ogee turned on its side) in custom-made copper containers, four of them, that slide into the slots. Last summer, we left the slots empty; the oddly shaped copper containers sat in a heap on the patio below. This year the spirit moved me – was it Jacob’s petulant silence? – to fill them.

As usual, Jacob knew what he was about: The boxes, with their green leaves filtering the light through the gaps in the balustrade, soften the starkness of the veranda wall. Soon, I hope, scarlet and coral geraniums, accented by electric blue lobelia, will tumble down its pale stucco-and-stone surface.

The flower boxes in place, I swept up the litter on the veranda and scrubbed the stone tiles, clearing the evidence of using the veranda and balustrade as a bird feeding table all winter. All that remained of the bird feed were a few green nets with the last of the seed-and-suet balls, now reduced to tumble-sized lumps. I rearranged them as they hung from the bars that cross in front of the flower box slots. They would be gone soon, I reasoned, as yellow-and-blue tits, with their white-and-black striped heads, flitted boldly to the boxes and away. I will miss them, I realised. In the solitary days in front of this computer, I have grown used to watching the tits and blackbirds, robins and nuthatches, even the odd woodpeaker, come and go.

I wondered, too, about the bold black squirrel that has come regularly to the food. As the weather warmed and the supply of seed dwindled, I realised he, like the birds, would have to resume foraging on his own. I wondered out loud about this.

‘Are you nuts?’ asked Himself. ‘There’s a whole wood right there!’

He’s right, of course. The squirrel, with its quivering intelligence and quick boldness, can get along without us.

Still, this morning, it was with amusement mingled with sadness I watched the fat brown-black squirrel move along the top of the balustrade, stopping now and again to peer over the edge. He looked left, he looked right. No seed nets – the birds finished them off yesterday afternoon. He stared upward at the post from which one had been suspended last week. Nothing.

He put his nose to the stone, as if he could inhale any crumb of seed or bread that might be left. His long black ears twitched as he scoured the floor. What could possibly be left, I wondered, after my sweeping and scrubbing Saturday?

‘Poor little chap,’ said Himself, who was shaving, when I told him.

‘I hope you mean that,’ said I.

Fasching

Yesterday was Faschingsdienstag, the culmination of Fasching, as carnival is known in German-speaking Europe. It’s a season of silliness, costumes, music and noisemakers, and it’s unlike anything I’ve experienced in Ireland or in California.

Fasching began for us in January, when I happened, by pure luck, to be in the centre of Salzburg to witness the start of a Fasching band festival. Bands from all over Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, dressed in outlandish costumes, played on platzes around the city for two days.

They played marching band instruments, with percussion sometimes augmented by traditional wooden blocks and clappers. Performing on outdoor stages, they played popular songs and traditional songs and marching songs, including one song that was repeated by all the bands through the day. A kind of anthem, I assume it’s associated with Fasching.

Himself and I were there again the next day when, with a huge crowd watching, the bands assembled and played along side one another. An MC egged us all on, and the crowded linked arms and swayed in time with the anthems. When it ended, band members mingled, laughing and talking, eating and drinking beer. Sometimes they stood in groups playing on and on. Dusk was gathering when we followed the last of the bands as it marched away.

Over the weeks since, I gathered what I could about Fasching from what was going on around me. Costumes and streamers of confetti were on sale in shops and grocery markets. Cases of sparkling wine were also prominently displayed. Several times on our way home from the city centre, we met people in costumes and painted faces waiting at bus stops. Last weekend we saw a brass band of about eight members playing on a bus as it pulled away. Just as the door closed, we heard the same Fasching anthem. I wanted to jump on the bus to hear them play it.

So yesterday, I bicycled into the Altstadt to see what I could of the last day of Fasching. It was a fine day warmed by a generous sun. Sandbars showed in the pale blue-green water of the Salzach, which is low right now. As I approached the city centre, there were dozens of people, many with bare legs and shoulders, lying on its steep grassy banks and playing on its sandy shore. A group of young people played a game that involved balancing bottles of beer in the sand then, at a signal, picking them up and drinking until someone shouted ‘Stop’.

I left my bike and simply walked, looking into shop windows and pausing now and again to read restaurant menus. I had heard that on Faschingsdienstag people wore costumes to work, so I was looking for as many costumes as I could find. Here and there were knots of children, sometimes shepherded by an adult, dressed up with painted faces. One group stood in narrow Linzergaße blowing noise makers nonstop. Another child of about five was dressed as a red devil. He looked up, wordless and unsmiling, at his father, who stood visiting with a friend.

Adults wore costumes too, the younger ones showing the most extravagant imaginations. Faces painted, dressed as pirates and oversized elves, as cowboys and sailors, in baby doll outfits and vamp clothes, they roamed the streets, arms over their companions’ shoulders, calling out to others and drinking beers. Sometimes there was no custom but bright coloured clothes, painted faces, wigs and outrageous hats. A waiter, dressed in the staid livery of the Hotel Sacher – the most expensive hotel in Salzburg – wore a bright orange fright wig as he served drinks on the hotel terrace.

When I had tired myself out walking, I turned to bike home again. Passing a bridge on my way, I stopped to see why a small crowd, some carrying placards, was milling about. A woman handed me a brochure and invited me to go to Rathausplatz. There was, she said, an exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.

Just then, a small band of women began playing jazzy-bluesy tunes while a news cameraman filmed them. One of the band, a big blonde woman in a bright violet jacket and matching violet glasses, played a terrific soprano sax. A young man in the crowd watching swayed and clapped as he watched.

I passed on the exhibition. The music and colour, laughter and sun, the women’s smiles as they played, had been enough for me.

A Year On

It’s snowing in Salzburg this morning, a rapid fall of small bead-like flakes. It’s gone quite cold again, minus four or five by the downstairs thermometer. For the first time in a month, I shovelled snow yesterday morning. I was out again today.

Now I watch as tits and nuthatches swing from the bundles of peanuts suspended over the veranda. Waiting for their turn at the food, they flutter high into the underside of the roof and perch on the edge of window sills. Blackbirds pick at the seeds on the balustrade ledge. I think I even spotted a robin a few minutes ago. These birds have become as familiar as those I watched from my window in Ireland.

I note this particularly because yesterday marked a year since I first saw Salzburg. It is a year since my husband began his job here. It’s been a remarkable time in which I’ve had to learn a different aesthetic and cultural vocabulary. How strange the architecture and landscape seemed when we first arrived. I could see beauty in it, but it was an foreign, even austere, beauty after the mist-softened grey stone and green of Ireland.

I’ve learned in this time a chastening kind of humility that arises from the inability to communicate about the simplest human transactions. In fact, I’ve learned more humility than I have German.

I gained far more respect and admiration for those immigrants who leave all behind to make new lives in foreign lands with far fewer resources than I have. Hard as it is for me, at least we arrived with a secure job, were given assistance through the bureaucracy and were eased by the reality that English is the lingua franca in Europe and much of the world. I can’t imagine how isolated and frustrated I would be were it not for that.

I’ve learned to navigate the buses with some ease. In that too, I’ve been lucky, because Salzburg has a very reliable, efficient and accessible bus system. Each stop is announced in advance and shown on a display. I just have to know the name of my stop, and I’m fine. In Rome, for instance, stops are neither displayed nor announced, resulting in anxiety and missed stops. Nor were the buses as regular or predictable as they are here. I can get where I need to go within just a few minutes of my appointment times.

I’ve discovered also that it’s easy enough to get around on the bicycle. I had been used to a bike being a piece of recreational equipment for which I dressed in sportswear. I’ve gotten used to seeing woman biking in skirts and heels, men biking in suits. In winter’s cold, now I can bike very well, thank you very much, wearing my long down coat, hat and gloves.

I’ve had to navigate supermarkets with the unfamiliar mingled with the familiar. How do you find evaporated milk for meatloaf if you can’t name it in German to the kid stocking the shelves? The closest equivalent, I’ve found, is bottled ‘Kaffee Milch’. And bread crumbs? Describing it as ‘cut up bread’ got me to the bread cubes, which, as it happened, were next to the bread crumbs.

There is a wider selection of products available here than in Ireland, but this abundance itself is bewildering. How do I choose from among the displays of twenty or more wurst, for instance, each with its name and description in German? I just plunge in and choose, pointing and gesturing when I have to.

There are so many ordinary things like this we’ve had to learn to negotiate: Road signs, doctors’ offices and health insurance, going to the hairdresser, paying bills online through interfaces that shift, apparently randomly, between German and English. I can’t just write a cheque, because all transactions here are handled electronically: There are no cheques. That was another thing I had to discover.

Some of these difficulties I’ve learned to manage with grace; with others, I was forced to practice keeping my frustration in check. Which is a learning experience in itself.

And, of course, I’ve learned to shovel snow.

Hoffnung auf Frühling

We returned from Rome late Saturday night. As we landed in Munich I could see a wet runway and leaden horizon, an ominous change after a week of sunlight and a brilliant blue skies. Fields stretched away in the growing dusk, dark brown and dun. As the autobahn climbed toward Salzburg, the brown changed to dingy white, barely perceptible in the dim light.

While we had been away, though, it had also been warm in Salzburg. Here on Katzenstraße, most of the snow has melted, save for crusted patches next to fences and gate pillars or under trees. Since we’ve returned, the sky has cleared but once or twice to allow a hesitant washed-out blue to break through pewter clouds.

Even so, the days are getting longer. Light fills the bedroom when we awaken now, and even at six in the evening I can see into the wood next to us. Tits, nuthatches and blackbirds still come to the feeding table, but yesterday I saw a blackbird plucking at a mound of earth in the garden. I haven’t seen the bold black squirrels for a couple of weeks now. They must have retreated to trees deep in the wood, perhaps to nest. A week or so ago, I began to hear a bird test his voice. Now, all morning, bird song thrills the air.

From my office window the other morning I saw movement in the wood. A figure wearing pink was coming in the direction of the house. I recognised our friend and neighbour Edith; she was carrying a basket filled with slender branches from a tree or shrub, its fresh growth bright red. And last night on Facebook she reported that the snowdrops are blooming. ‘Hoffnung auf Frühling’—Hope of Spring—she added.

Genau, as they are fond of saying here. Exactly. This morning as I stood watching from the kitchen window something caught my eye at the edge of the fishing pond beyond the houses that face us. Across the expanse of grey-blue ice, at the edge of the opposite shore, a faint line of white ruffled and frothed. Water was lapping the shore. The ice is receding.

There is hope of spring.

Agency

Last week’s snow still piles the sides of the street and blankets the wide fields behind our house. It lies in jagged heaps on the frozen fishing pond seen through the houses across the way. The wood to our side is a tangle of grey-brown trucks and muted dark foliage screening a white floor. From my window, every so often I glimpse brighter colours as walkers crunch along the path through its trees. Under a pewter sky, the bright colours moving in the gloom catch one’s eye.

It’s been very cold, not rising above -1 C in the daytime and dropping much lower overnight. Bundled up in heavy coat with a scarf wound high and tight, I ventured out on my bike last week and again yesterday, rolling very slowly over the slick patches along the path by the river, wary lest the front tyre should suddenly fly from under me. Especially treacherous is the incline at the top of our street where several householders neglect to shovel their share of the street. The ice there accumulates inches deep. Even with gravel strewn over it, I couldn’t trust it. I dismounted and pushed the bike the 10 metres or so, worried in the event for my footing.

In these cold and frequently dark days, I’ve been considering the species of lassitude to which I’ve too often succumbed. Some time back I stumbled across a word, velleity, defined as the lowest degree of volition, a slight wish or tendency of mild degree, a ‘wish too slight to lead to action’. I copied out the definition because it seems a nearly perfect description of my own level of volition at times like this. This frozen winter seems to, at times, reduce my motivation to that level of personal agency.

And, more recently, I followed a link from Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, to a commentary by Sam Rocha at Vox-Nova, in which he writes of boredom he suspects drives some of our frequently aimless ramblings through the rooms, corridors and antechambers of internet blogs and news sites.

‘I ask,’ Rocha writes, ‘(myself first and foremost): What is boredom but loneliness, alienation, lovelessness, and the desire for something to occupy the time in a way that puts those stark realities at a distance? What is boredom but not quite feeling at home in the place you are?’

Too often, I, your Spy, fumble around in this narrow small room of this blog, writing in spurts, at times with enthusiasm, delighted with the spectacle that surrounds me, at other times more halting and introspectively. Does the rise and fall in my volition — the attacks of lassitude or velleity — relate to the sense that sometimes I am not entirely at home in the place where I am?

It’s all very exciting to discover another way of living and to learn, however poorly, a new language. But there are days when I’m not entirely sure who I am. I wander the city, eyes wide with fascination at its beauties, but then resent being mistaken for a visitor. Someone stops me to ask directions, and I fumble, pointing and trying to find the words, and another passerby stops to intervene and delivers them in fluent German.

‘You can tell them you don’t know,’ Himself gently reminds me.

But I want to be able to help, long to show even simple competency. Being reduced to child-like inability to give directions, to communicate on the most fundamental level, challenges my sense of who I am.

This is not to suggest I want to leave Salzburg. Though I  felt a wave of homesickness looking at pictures of Tipperary in a calendar sent by my sister-in-law, I doubt at this point I would feel more at home in Ireland. Nor do I have the slightest desire to return the United States. No, what is required is continuing work — to learn German, to make a discipline of writing, here and elsewhere, to explore Austria and Salzburg to make the less familiar more familiar.

In fact, every so often, while riding the bus or waiting in the physical therapist’s office, an extraordinary feeling of well being comes over me. It is a sense that combines warmth and peace with something like the comfort of a maternal embrace. I look up a the pale light coming in a window and feel, suddenly, at home.

I mentioned it to Himself, who tells me he’s experienced the same sensation. There’s no way for us to know, at this point, how long we will have the chance to make our home here, but we’d like to think it will be for a long time.

Occasionally another expat American will tell me that Salzburg is a bit parochial or that there is a kind of snobbishness in some elements of life. For the time being, though, it is big enough so that the former hasn't struck us, and, in our ignorance, we are shielded from the latter.

What’s more, we are very very lucky in our neighbours here on Katzenstraße. Edith and Hannes, Sigrid and Gerald and their daughter joined us for dinner here on Saturday. After spaghetti and salad, we sat with our wine and schnapps listening to music and talking — switching from English to German and back — late into the night. Their warmth and acceptance has given us a social life we would not otherwise enjoy. The field, the pond and the wood may be frozen, but inside the radiators strum, tick and pump out warmth.

It’s good to be at home, here in the wood-panelled flat, at the end of Katzenstraße.

Getting Back on the Bicycle

Snow has been falling steadily since early yesterday morning, and the roofs along Katzenstraße lie beneath thick white cushions. Seen through the gap between the houses across the street, the fishing pond spreads blue-white and still. The tangle of brown branches in the wood is thick with snow; shaggy green arms of the conifers droop under its weight. Up and down the street, front gardens are heaped high, and still it falls.

The fraternity of neighbours at our end of the street greet each other as we shovel, struggling with the packed snow left by car tracks in the early morning. Three times yesterday did I clear the street in front of this house and another time this morning. The house has a long frontage, and since November we are the only tenants. The street is a private one, so each householder is responsible for clearing the road. It is a point of honour, as well as neighbourliness, to do one’s part.

It’s work, of course, but I find pleasure too in the communal effort. It’s good to spend a half hour in strenuous effort, good to feel the power in my arms as I lift the heavy shovelful and send it over the wall into the yard. Up and down the street the shovels scrape against the tarmac and clumps of snow fly upwards then cascade, white against the silver light. The shovel sticks against the stubborn imprint of car tracks, and I push bluntly against it, softly breathing out the frustration before loosening the icy patch. Up and over the wall the snow flies, one shovelful after another. Then I stamp into the house, boots crusted white and, changing into house shoes, make coffee, my face pink with cold.

This is the first significant snow we’ve had since Christmas. Milder temperatures and some rain had melted what snow had remained. It was mild enough, in fact, that Himself and I cycled from Katzenstraße to the Altstadt, joining the parade of other Salzburgers in the paths along the river. It had been many weeks since we had cycled, and my anxiety threatened to immobilise me. There were still icy patches along the path. Would I be able to negotiate them without falling? We could but try.

In fact, I am too often prone to paralysis, too often overwhelmed by events or other people. That which must be done for familial or social reasons overpowers the personal. Emotional turmoil, illness and injury intrude. Soon I slip into avoidance, passivity and silence.

Living in Austria and being largely unable to speak German can also feel isolating. I put off making appointments, for instance, because of my insecurity in communicating. It’s embarrassing, frankly, to stammer in broken German and then, burst out, child-like, ‘Can you help me in English?’ Usually they can, but I feel a fool afterward. But, like so many experiences, all I can do it do it anyway. I have to keep trying.

So here I am again, getting back on the bicycle after weeks of silence. It’s also a bit embarrassing, having faltered and then disappeared, to reappear with little to say for myself. However, it’s time to lift my head and begin moving again.

I can but try.

Autumn Light

I’ve been reading at William Fiennes’ The Snow Geese for several months now, slowly following his journey from Texas to the northern reaches of Canada as he tracks the spring migration of the birds. The book is in part an extended meditation on home and missing home, on homesickness, nostalgia and longing. And on days like today, with the dim light of a low-lying sun never seeming to reveal the sky, longing, homesickness and nostalgia are very present for me.

While I love autumn’s beauty, captivated by its palette of bright colours set against the austere neutrals, a contrast that quickens my pulse, it can be a difficult time. For me, death and other losses litter the autumnal landscape. The fading light of the dying year casts these losses in starker relief. The wood next to our flat is no longer a tall green wall. The bare branches of its tree now weave a dull brown screen that filters the light. Inside the flat, the wooden floors gleam darkly; only when I light the lamps – as early as 4:30 or 5 – is there brightness, and that willed.

That’s not to say we are giving into gloom. Yesterday – Sunday – we climbed Kapuzinerberg, one of the two mountains around which the core of the city is built. It is the taller of the two, 640 metres, and it is mostly green space with trails and a small fortress built during the Thirty Years War, now gasthaus serving snacks and beer, at the top. (The Festung, the city’s signature fortress, sits atop the more heavily developed Mönchsberg, the mountain on the other side of the Salzach.)

The last time we climbed Kapuzinerberg, it was a warm late May afternoon, and we panted under a tall canopy of green until we reached the top. Yesterday we climbed by a different route, and the dim light reflected off a thick carpet of copper-coloured beech leaves. We were warmed with exertion, but stopping at a precipice and looking north, we soon became chilled. However, we stood long enough to see that part of the city spread below us, and I was surprised at how many landmarks, strange to me not many months ago, seem familiar to me now.

At the top we stopped to look southeast, but here the landscape was less familiar. Some Sunday afternoon, we agreed, we should explore those street just to see what’s there. Then we descended, keeping to our left the city wall built on the steep flank at the same period as the small fortress above. Wall and fortress were so effective a deterrent they were never tested.

We didn’t stop for beer and wurstl in the gasthaus because we were going directly to Schloss Leopoldskron. Commissioned in 1736 by one of Salzburg’s prince-archbishops, Schloss Leopoldskron is an elaborate rococo palace that sits on the edge of a large pond in an expanse of green space.

In the early 20^th century, it was bought by theatre and film director Max Reinhardt, famous locally as one of the founders of the Salzburg Festival. During the war it was confiscated by the Nazis as ‘Jewish property’. After the war it was bought by the American foundation, the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, and is now used as a conference site. Fans of The Sound of Music recognise its lake as the location for some of the film’s outdoor shots and its grounds and one of its façades as models for the sound stage set of the Von Trapp villa.

However, it is closed to the public every day except one day a year, which was yesterday, when it was open for tours. By the lake, its small formal garden open for an Adventmarkt.

Along with other residents of Salzburg, we waited on line for nearly an hour to view this national treasure, with its stucco ceilings and chandeliers, its faded Chinoiserie room, the gilt and mirrored games room, and the elaborate neo-rococo library, with plaster cherubs and beautifully carved wood, the latter interior commissioned by Reinhart.

The tour was conducted, of course, in German. I was pleased to realise that though I could not follow word for word, description by description, the guide’s commentary, I was able to at least follow the general outline of her remarks. Even though Himself, better at German than I am, filled in some gaps, it is reassuring to find I’ve made even a little progress in German.

It was late and the dun-coloured light rapidly fading when we left the tour to wander the stalls of the small Adventmarkt. We inaugurated the Weihnachtsmarkt season with our first cup of Glühwein, mulled wine popular at the street markets that will soon be open all over Salzburg, as well as throughout most of this part of Europe.

Then, just as we were about to leave, a children’s chorus began singing, and we stopped to listen. They stood in a narrow gravelled path at the edge of the lake. Torches were burning around the grounds, and the lights on the far side of the lake as well as from the garden reflected in its dark waters. The faces of the chorus –  young children and older boys, their voices already deepened, along with a few adult women – were illuminated by a couple of lamps. We listeners were in near darkness, the flickering light occasionally catching a face in the crowd. The chorus sang what must be traditional German and Austrian Christmas music, of which I understood a word here and there.

Then came a familiar song, odd to me in the circumstance, knowing its commercial roots. But, as it happens, ‘I’d Like to Teach the World To Sing’, which began life as a Coco-Cola jingle in the seventies, became a popular Christmas song in Europe, as I learned while living in Ireland. Yesterday, the children sang it with enthusiasm.

Driving home in near darkness, through a part of Salzburg that seems remote from my daily life, I was pleased to realise how familiar have become the mysterious, winding streets of even this part of the city, tucked into the curve of Mönchsberg, where not many months ago I got lost. Last night I knew, almost without knowing, the way. Shops and street corners have become landmarks, if only subliminally. I felt as though, had we turned off Mavis, our Mistress of the GPS, I could have guided us home.

Which reminds me of William Fiennes and his reflection on homesickness and nostalgia. He writes of turning his longing for the home he loved in the past into ‘a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place. . . . The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.’

I am not sure who I am these days or what my job is, not sure what nationality I represent or where my home is. But every small bit of progress I make – in learning German, in knowing my way around Salzburg, in writing something new – makes me feel more grounded in where I am now and gives me more hope that I will be able to manage where I will be tomorrow.

Leaving Tipperary, Redux

Last weekend we were in South Tipperary for my mother-in-law’s 90^th birthday party. Our house next door to hers has not yet been rented, so we camped out there, sleeping in the bedroom we had left furnished.

In March, leaving Tipperary and our house had been wrenching. In the minutes before locking the empty house for the last time, I had walked from room to room, trying but failing not to cry. My footsteps echoed as the sun cut across walls painted in colours we had so carefully chosen. I closed the blinds and curtains over views I had watched in all lights and weather.

But in the weeks since I had settled comfortably in Salzburg. Our flat by the wood, with its walnut panelled walls and ceilings and its views over the wood is peaceful, calm. Blackbirds and tits sing in its garden, their sweet music filling the air, rising into the office where I work or the living room as I read. Only last week I came up the stair and into the flat feeling the serenity of being at home. The longing I had for the house in Tipperary faded more quickly than I had imagined possible. On our drive from the Cork airport Saturday, I briefly felt nostalgic on passing a road sign in both English and Irish.

‘I’m back in another country where I don’t understand the signs,’ I remarked to Himself. But, in truth, I was less emotional than I had expected.

I had been up late the night before, unable to sleep, so my eyes burned with exhaustion. Arriving at our house, I made up the bed in our cheerful yellow bedroom and pulled the blackout blinds to take a nap. Pressing myself into the familiar mattress in the dimness of the familiar room, I felt it good to be there. ‘This is home. This is my bed,’ I repeated to myself as I tried to relax and sleep.

Later, refreshed, it was good to sit in my mother-in-law’s well-worn sitting room visiting with nephews over from Edinburgh and down from Dublin. It was good to have Sally, the Border Collie, roll over onto her back, and press her breastbone forward, her sole trick, pleading for a belly rub. It was good to walk the rough weedy garden, to see the pear and apple trees now in bloom, to explore the humid depths of the polythene house with its earthy perfume. In summer, it will be hot inside, the air fragrant with loam and ripe fruit, as insects buzz and ping against its taut plastic walls.

And it was good that evening to move through the crowded birthday party seeing friends, cousins and nieces and nephews, catching up while apologising for leaving so quickly we hadn’t had time to say goodbye to most of them. Stefan, the blind musician who plays for the area’s seniors at the Cahir Day Centre, played his guitar and sang, accompanied by his friend on accordion, the entire evening. They played old standards and traditional songs, including my favourite, Slievenamon. And The Wild Rover, the wildly inappropriate appropriate song another band had given us as the waltz at our wedding. And A Nation Once Again, the rebel song. We stayed late and left laughing.

Sunday, we took Sally up the track in the Galtees as we have done so many Sundays. We noticed the furled tips of the ferns rising through the bronze of last summer’s bracken. Tightly folded like green foetuses, they will open and within weeks the roadsides and tracks will be lined with fresh young growth. Tiny violets were vivid in the pale green moss lining the path we walked.

It was good to visit with family, some I hadn’t seen for a very long time. It was good to meet friends and neighbours, to keep alive relationships. But it is hard work living in a small community where families have lived side by side with other families for untold generations. Roots go deep, and recall can be long. The memory of slights or perceived slights can be as long standing as the moss-covered stones in the hedgerows.

When I failed to recognise a long-time friend of my husband’s family, prompting her to re-introduce herself, I felt obliged to shift into high gear as I engaged with her, as though this would patch over the insult. I should have known who she was, but in the crowded room, my glance slid over her as I greeted the woman next to her.

There are my husband’s many cousins, men and women he grew up with, whose personalities and faces he knows nearly as well as he knows his brothers and sisters. After 24 years of marriage and not quite three years living among them, I still confuse the women, the family resemblance being remarkable. Of the men, I search for names, trying to place all but the five or six I have come to know better. Had we stayed in South Tipperary, I’m sure names and faces would be recalled with more fluency, but building these relationships has been interrupted again. Rather than relaxing, I found myself working hard, wanting to avoid giving offense.

Another day  we had a meal at Kilcoran Lodge Hotel, the nearby country house that has hosted family parties over several generations. There we encountered family acquaintances my husband has known since childhood. I tried to gauge what I sensed was hesitancy in their greeting, the want of warmth, the pause before greeting us. They hadn’t failed to recognise us. I examined my conscience. Was it awareness of our slight, justified or not, of someone close to her? Was he remembering disagreements between his relations and ours? Conscious of the proximity of their table, we lowered our voices, muting the names we pronounce, hesitant of what may be overheard. In a community of 5,000, counting inhabitants of both town and countryside, one is always aware that there are no secrets and little anonymity.

There too are the entanglements of family, the decades-old hurts and jealousies always simmering that bubble to the surface under the pressure of special occasions. These require negotiating a landscape as treacherous as bog land lest one is forced to choose sides or listen again to accounts of past injustices. Also requiring effort are those personalities that rub uncomfortably, irritating like wool worn on a hot day, that must be borne with grace and compassion.

In Salzburg, for the first time in our marriage, we are living far from any family. Few know us here. I can slide into the crowd, invisible. Unlike in Ireland, the custom here is to ignore people you pass on the streets, to keep focussed on your own destination. People are friendly, but the community is less engulfing. Lacking, at least for now, the social and familial ties we have in Ireland, we have become less tethered, more able to focus on our own concerns.

Early Tuesday morning, the sky still dark, we emptied and unplugged the refrigerator, closed our luggage, and locked the house. As we drove the quiet road past the ruin of Whitechurch with its graves, past the big tree, past Millgrove and Tincurry, the headlamps of our hired car catching the gleam of the whitethorn blossoms in the hedge, I wasn’t emotional or teary. I was simply tired. I was ready to go home.

Bells

Living in Europe pours light on the vastness of my ignorance, despite my university education. I’m learning, among other things, how little experience I have with bells, church bells specifically.

In Ireland, of course, there are church bells. Bells toll just before mass, they toll for funerals, and they toll for the Angelus, twice a day, at noon and at six. I got used to the rhythm of each of these bells. A single bell striking repeatedly at moderate intervals calls one to mass. The Angelus is distinctive: three strikes in close succession, then a pause. Three notes and a pause. Again three notes and a pause. Then nine notes in succession. I find myself counting them out, as if ordering my day. By tradition, RTE, the national television and radio network of Ireland, broadcasts the Angelus every day at noon and six. The evening news begins not at 6 p.m., but at 6:01, immediately following the Angelus. In homes where the faith is taken seriously, one would pause, at least briefly, in respect.

I loved that, from our kitchen and bedroom, I could hear the Angelus drift across the fields between our house and the church in Ballylooby, 2 kilometres away. As I adjusted to the strangeness of early darkness in winter, I became accustomed to the rhythms of the devotion punctuating my day. One Saturday in December, that first year we were there, I spent making spaghetti sauce, keeping an eye on the clock to time the process as the sun set. Even so, when I was called out into the pitch-blackness of evening to meet a visitor, I was startled to hear the first notes of the Angelus, so dark it was, so early.

The funeral bell has its own rhythm, an agonisingly slow beat and long pause, beat and long pause, a pace so slow that each pause stretches out over accumulating seconds, mourners standing in the grey light as pall bearers struggle up the church aisle, shaky with the unexpected burden shouldered, the community waiting as if to take the next breath when the bell strikes again. I never ascertained how long the tolling went on, how many strokes, how many minutes. It could be simply that it begins tolling with the arrival of the hearse and continues until the coffin is in place before the altar and the principal mourners are seated. But rhythm of a funeral bell is unmistakeable. Hearing the slow notes drifting over the bustle of a morning in town, one reflects on the solemnity of the moment.

I write, of course, of my experience near a small town and even smaller village. My experience of larger towns and cities was more limited. I recall one Sunday morning in Dublin hearing from our hotel window the bells of first one church and then another tolling for mass. As in the country, they were single bells, one stately note repeated, calling the people to church.

Last summer, we attended a wedding in Valderrobles, Spain, staying for three nights a couple of hundred metres away from the ancient vaulted church that crowns a hill down which cobble streets wind. From its heights just above our wood-shuttered window, the church bell marked each quarter hour, through the sun-struck day, through the shimmering velvet night, into the cool golden dawn. I loved its sonorous commanding voice ordering the day, minding the hours of the night.

But we were unprepared for the bells of Salzburg.

We moved into our flat on the afternoon of Palm Sunday. Throughout that Holy Week, in the early evenings when I was alone in the flat, I heard chiming of bells from across the wood and the field beyond, coming from an unseen church. This was not the tolling of a single bell but a volley of notes, like song. The chiming continued for some minutes, five or ten or more. Other times, I heard pealing from another direction. There were bells from two churches, each close enough for the tolling to drift in an open window or even, more faintly, a closed one.

Easter morning we awoke to extravagantly pealing bells, the notes dancing in on the golden sunlight streaming through the windows.

‘See, I told you,’ I said to Himself, who, when I told him about the bells, had teased me about having gone cracked.

I hear them still of an evening, not necessarily on the hour or half hour. I don’t know whether they signal services or a particular devotion as the Angelus does. Perhaps it is simply bell-ringing practice, if there are bell ringers at all rather than a mechanical programme. Sometimes I am confused, hearing in the thrum of the radiators chimes that, on opening the window to hear them more clearly, I discover didn’t drift in from outside at all, only from within my excitable imagination, eager for new stimulation. Since that first week, I’ve located the two churches, each barely over a kilometre away, each with a narrow pastel nave under an arrow-shaped roof and a thick, tall bulb-topped steeple. I can see one from the flat, just across the river, illuminated gold in the blue-black night. I haven’t visited either.

But Sunday morning, as I sat alone in the early quiet of the living room that looks west over the wood and south over the field, I listened, more carefully, to the tolling, trying to create the space in my mind to describe it. It was then I first realised there are several bells chiming at once, each with its unique voice. It began with the deep note of a single bass bell. Then others joined in, chorus like, the tempo increasing, higher voices thrilling in a rising melody, exuberant, calling out over and over, the deeper bell heavy beneath them marking time, all the notes bubbling up like a Baroque extravagance above an altarpiece, a swelling golden cloud rising into heaven. I listened, hearing as well the piping voice of the tit and the sweet, clear blackbird note in the wood rising from the garden, as the bells’ song filled the sky, wave after wave of chime over chime, cresting to tumescent crescendo. Then, gradually, the notes began to calm, the roiling melody falling slightly, the chorus muting, until, at last, the deep bell struck unaccompanied. One. Two. Three.

And it was done.

The bell song died away. And still I listened to the call of the tit, three notes like double chimes, then silent, then repeated, rising in the wood, high and pure, at last echoing in my mind like the deep distant reverberations of the bells.

Landscapes

Late last week the weather turned spring-like here, the days warm and bright, soft air drifting in through open windows. It reached about 18 or 19 C yesterday, too warm for the wool sweaters that are all I brought with me. The mountain that’s closest to us, seen through the windows of our hotel room, is green, its snow entirely melted. The towering alp to the northeast though, the other side of which we saw as we drove from Munich, still rises white against the blue sky.

The close mountain is about as tall, relative to our position, as Galteemore, the tallest of the peaks in the Galtee Mountains, as seen from our windows in South Tipperary. The summits of the Galtees, though, were stripped of their forests millennia ago, cleared for cultivation, and through erosion became, over time, boggy heath land. The mountain seen from the windows here in Salzburg are still forested at its summit, deep pine green and faded brown conifers in the early spring. Here and there, halfway down, are large grassy clearings with isolated buildings. The clearings are steep, steep as those in the wild Connemara mountains in the west of Ireland, where highland sheep graze on spindly black legs in nearly vertical pastures.

I see no sheep on this mountain, only the occasional flash as the sun glances off a passing car on a road not visible from here. I will miss the now-familiar green meadows when we move this weekend to our flat by the wood. The mountains are more distant there.

I’ve been struggling with how to describe Salzburg and the surrounding Bavarian countryside. What does it look like? Why or how is it different from Ireland? Or the Mediterranean landscape of Southern California, also split by mountains? I’ve compared Salzburg’s mountains to the Wasatch in Salt Lake City, but they’re similar only to a point.

The landscape and the architectural aesthetic is so different from these that it’s as though I have no words, or am only now beginning to find the words, to write about it. Away from its historic centre, Salzburg is not particularly remarkable. Its buildings are low – no office or tall apartment blocks here – a bit blockish and fairly modern. Parks and green space are plentiful, and many are dotted with schlosses – grand houses of the past. A long narrow park with a path through it is lined with these schlosses, set far apart. Along the river opposite the Altstadt, a 10 or 15 or more large, square-but-gracious-looking pastel-painted schlosses sit side by side.

The river, the Salzach, is wide and shallow, at least where I’ve peered into it. Its waters flow north in gentle ruffles and are pale, pastel green-blue, through which I can see stones on a sandy bottom as through pale blue glass. It’s very different from the deep bog-brown smooth-flowing River Suir that runs through Cahir, rising fish glinting in the late sun of a summer evening. Thickly leaved horse chestnuts and beeches clustered on its banks are reflected on its mirror-like impenetrable surface. The rocky banks of the Salzach, by contrast, slope steeply down to the river and are nearly bare.

As a Californian, used to muted earth-toned and pastel buildings, I was impressed by the use of colour in Irish towns. Colour is even more evident in the cityscape of Salzburg. Buildings are painted deep, saturated and bold colours. Just from my window on one small neighbour, I see apartment buildings painted salmon, saffron, lemon yellow and rich sky blue. The white house across the way has a purple door and mailbox; even its chain link fence is painted purple. The office building next to it, also white, has window frames of magenta. The schlosses, as I mentioned, are pink, yellow, blue and gold. In the Altstadt and the surrounding distracts, rococo facades are also painted pastels with filigreed ornaments in contrasting colours.

In the country side, buildings are timbered, often with hipped roofs decorated open-work gingerbread shapes. Churches in country villages rise in tall, narrow austere blocks, with vertical thrusts of steeple attached on otherwise unornamented front walls. Many of the steeples bulge with onion-shaped bulbs just before their pinnacles. So unlike the stone churches of Ireland, they still startle me when I see their masculine silhouettes dominant in the landscape.

In memory, Ireland seemed comfortable and emotionally accessible from the first time I saw it. Although new to me, the landscape seemed natural, familiar to my psyche. Here, the landscape seems exotic, and though I once had the vocabulary of art and architecture, now I stumble, searching for words now lost to me. Like German, the landscape is not disagreeable; it’s just pushing me to find words to express meaning.

An Encounter

Spring – in its commonly understood sense, not its astronomical one – is late this year in Tipperary. A week ago, the day before the movers arrived to pack, I walked from the corner where our road, the ancient Dublin road, meets the even narrower road to Ballylooby, seat of the local parish. It is at this corner that the old house, built by my mother-in-law’s grandfather, stands. As far as I know, it was last occupied sometime after the birth of my husband’s oldest sister – who is now retired – when my father-in-law, the penultimate child of a family of ten, moved his young family from the cottage to a town on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland in pursuit of his career. The roofline is showing cracks, slates are slipping, windows are shattered. Still, remnants of furniture and crockery lie cluttered under its low ceilings. Ash from recent fires fill its wide open-hearth fireplace. As a teenager, when visitors from Boston arrived for summer visits, my husband and his brothers spent nights there, in upper rooms reached by stairs now so sagging I lack the courage to explore them.

At the disused entrance to the yard, horse chestnut branches dangled over the gate, bulbous purple tips oozing. I had been searching for signs of spring, wanting some hint of it before leaving. There were a few, but they were slight – reddening of bare dogwood branches on road sides, a scattering of deep gold and vivid purple crocuses at the base of the Big Tree, and the hint of arrow tipped leaves where I had planted tulips bulbs last fall. Still, the spreading branches of beeches across the fields showed no hint of pale green haze. Hedges were dull green and brown, showing jagged spears of pale torn ash branches where they had been recently cut. I would not see the daffodils bloom before going away.

I was on my way to our neighbours, the Murphys. From our kitchen window, you can see the rounded roof of the Murphy hay shed half hidden by the trees, a line marking the near horizon below the further horizon of the Knockmealdowns. When I first came to Tipperary, Anne Murphy was particularly kind to me. Offering red wine during late afternoon visits, she gave me also advice and lent cookbooks as I tried to learn to cook using different measures and ingredients, vegetables new to me and unfamiliar cuts of meat (or names of cuts of meat). Soon, though, changing work schedules, illness, the birth of her grandchild – life – had limited our visits. It had been too long since we sat together with a glass of red wine, and now I was going away.

Anne, her husband Michael, and I sat by the fire in their sitting room that looks west over the rolling fields, the low sun bright in our eyes. Michael and Anne told me what they could tell about the big tree, how it was part of the hedge at the entrance of the avenue leading to Millgrove, how it came to be burned, and how our neighbours stood circling it, protesting over two days, refusing to let the council cut it down. This was not long ago, perhaps 15 years back, within the time I had been coming to the neighbourhood, but I had never heard the story. They promised to try to recall more details of the tree’s history and send them to me.

We agreed that the hard frosts of winter were lasting too long. Usually by Patrick’s Day the road sides and gardens would be filled with daffodils. Now, a week before the 17th, there were just the tips of leaves and bare swelling buds, cresting the earth only this week. I worried aloud about the birds I had been feeding. How would they survive when I left? Michael didn’t agree with feeding birds; it makes them lazy, he said. But the winter has been so cold, exclaimed Anne and I. They would have starved! Maybe, he conceded, more out of kindness than conviction, I thought.

Anne told me about visiting Salzburg with their daughter, who has worked in one after another European capital for years now. It’s a beautiful city, they said, a nice drive from Munich, convenient to Italy, even Paris. I would learn German, she was sure, though her daughter prefers French. German, we agreed, is easier to pronounce than French, which I studied for years in secondary school and university without gaining verbal fluency. I’d get by, she told me. In the cities of Europe, if not in the country, so many people speak English. It’s true, I said. Dependent on tourism, Salzburg is a welcoming city, and most people I met there speak English.

I drained the last of my glass of wine and stood, saying goodbye to Michael, urging him to take care of himself. He was born on the morning of my mother-in-law’s 18th birthday, and his health has been poor recently. Anne and I embraced at the door, then she stepped outside with me. Under a small tree near the door, she picked a bright gold crocus and handed it to me. ‘Put this in a book,’ she said.

In the field next to their long drive, sheep congregated at the rail fence, bawling loudly. Were they hungry, I wondered. No, said Anne, it’s just they hear our voices. We said goodbye again, and she went into the house, waving as she went. I clutched the crocus and crossed to the fence, drawn by the sheep. Those closest to the fence put their heads over it, while more approached from behind them, bawling louder. Heavy with thick dirty wool, they watched me as the noise of their bawling swelled. Though they must be ewes, I thought, the heavy bass of their baaing was masculine in its intensity. It rumbled up from the depth, Robeson-deep, shuddering the air. I watched them; they watched me with equal intensity. Strange, I thought, how I’d never stood and contemplated sheep in the time I’d been there. Well, there was the solitary ram we sometimes passed in a small pen on our bike rides. I had dismounted and stood watching him. But never had I seen sheep come up to the fence, observing me while bawling at volume. I tried to take in their faces, black and dull white-grey, their thick coats, the shape of their hooves, their eyes and ears.

Those at the fence stood watching me watching them while stragglers behind them drew closer. I longed to reach out to stroke one. What would happen? I tentatively put a hand out; the ewe drew back. Still, we stood.

At length, I tried the trick Himself had showed me as we stood next to a field of young calves, also watching us. I drew myself up and, while looking intently, suddenly jumped side to side: right foot, left foot.

Unlike the calves, they did not all immediately scatter, but it startled them. They drew back, and briefly the bawling quieted. Then it rose again, loud and deep; it followed me as I walked away in the growing dusk, still holding between two fingers my golden crocus.

The Birds

It's lambing time here in Ireland. It’s been weeks since we’ve out on our bikes, rolling through grey- and green-lined lanes, catching sight of sheep in the pastures. It's not going to happen now before we leave again for Salzburg. But when I went out this morning in the early quiet, just after 7, I could hear from across the fields the low bawling of the ewes and the higher bleating of their lambs.

I stopped and listened for a minute. It's warmer this morning, after several mornings of hard frosts and temperatures of -3 or -5. The sky, stretching back to where the horizon meets the blue Knockmeadowns, was heavy blue-grey. I stood on the step and listened thoughtfully, with rare attention: There were the bawlings of the sheep and the lowings of cattle and, over it all, the sharp cawings of the crows as they called each other from field to field. There was no low rumble of traffic on motorway or road, which is what we heard when we stopped to listen outside the flat by the wood in Salzburg. Just the sheep and cattle and crows and the sweet twittering of small birds filling the broad, strangely luminous, sky arching over the green valley from the Galtees to the Knockmealdowns.

I wondered where the lively bold robin, who flits to my feet when I come out with the seed each morning, had gone. He's been there every morning, sometimes two of them, through the hard frosts and snow. But they are solitary birds, I believe, and last spring they seemed to disappear from our garden at a certain point, nesting, probably, further down the bottom of the site in the dense hedge there. In fact, yesterday I watched a magpie lift high over the hedge with a twig in its mouth, then return and make the same journey with another twig.

This morning I again filled the bird feeders where the tits, finches and sparrows congregate and scattered seed under the low branches of the hedge for the blackbirds and thrushes. I cast it across the rough stone area that has served as our patio, where the doves and wood pigeons, the crows and jackdaws, Willie wagtails and magpies, hunt and peck out the best bits. I've done so every morning since the mellow autumn with its seeds and berries and late fruit turned to frosts and barren ground. The winter was so cold that even a cock pheasant took to stalking the ground, scrounging for seeds under the feeder. Last spring I scattered seed and filled the feeders until the summer was well established, but this year I won't be here. I can only hope the ground soon warms so the thrushes and blackbirds can root out snails and slugs from the uncultivated grass. From the hotel room in Salzburg, I fretted last week when I heard it was snowing in South Tipperary, fretted because I imagined the birds in vast white blankness, unable to forage for grubs and seeds.

Naturally, Himself points out that there have been birds for hundreds of thousands of years, and they have survived without Saint Lorraine feeding them, and they will go on surviving when I am not here. But not these particular birds, our birds, the thrushes and blackbirds that sang last summer as we sat in the warmth of a rare sunny evening. Not the pert bold robin that flits to my feet when I come out each morning. They are the birds I feed, not the untold generations of those birds that survived before me.

I had awakened early, tossing in the half darkness, worrying. My husband leaves tomorrow evening to return to the office in Salzburg. I’ll remain behind to oversee the packing and shipping and turn the house over to the estate agent. The finality of this week is closing in on me; we are really leaving this house. We will be once again packing all, or nearly all, of our possessions and moving them to another country. Now clothes hang in wardrobes or lie folded in drawers; now dishes and saucepans and casseroles are stacked in cupboards, and books line shelves. But Monday or Tuesday, possibly, there will be chaos as packers call me from room to room while they toss (or place neatly) all of it into packing cases and my stomach churns and knots. Then they will leave, and I will find myself in an empty, or nearly empty, house, rooms echoing, as I contemplate the luggage to be hauled to Dublin and into the hold of the plane, for a flight that hasn’t even been booked on a date still to be determined. The car hasn’t been disposed of. A tenant has not been found. Accounts haven’t yet been closed. I have no address to which to forward the mail. But by two weeks time, at the outside, I will be once again in Salzburg.

The Wood

Wednesday, Agnes, the relocation specialist, drove us to five different rental possibilities. From the comfort of our house in Ireland, we had ticked boxes on a form outlining our requirements, indicating their relative importance on a 0 to 2 scale. Our answers were, of course, limited by our complete ignorance of what houses are like in Salzburg, what the cost of living is or the net amount of the check each month, as well as of other of unknowns and variables. And, as it happens, move-in costs are enormous. In addition to rent, there is a deposit amounting to, generally, two or three months’ rent as well as a broker’s commission of another two months’ rent plus 20% VAT. Who has €5,000 or €6,000, over and above rent, lying around, liquid and accessible? Not us – we just finished furnishing one house and building a garage. It’s one more thing on the overwhelming list of things we’ll have to work out.

Among our requirements for a flat, ranking high is enough space for a bedroom and a spare plus at least one additional room that can be a dedicated (or nearly dedicated) office. Another essential is accessibility to the city centre by bus. We intend only to have one car, and I will rely on the bus and my bicycle to get around while my husband is at the office. And we want to be able have a meal and drinks of an evening out and get home by bus. Ideally, the flat itself with be within walking distance of the city centre, but we realise that may not be possible. Salzburg is a tourist-oriented city, and rents reflect this.

Of the properties we looked at Wednesday, only one really met these requirements, and it was, though spacious and close to the centre, a uninspiring place with cramped and depressing bathrooms. It’s going to be hard to let go of the pleasant, light-filled house in Ireland, designed and built to meet our specific needs. We tramped through the flats on offer, trying to remain positive and open to the possibilities, working out costs in our heads, with growing disillusionment. Three-year leases are standard here, and with the move-in costs so high, one doesn’t lightly take on just anything with the expectation of moving in a few months’ time.

One place, the least likely of all, did capture our imagination, though. We reached it after driving what seemed a long way from the city centre, and then down a narrow lane on the edge of town. The flat takes up the top floor of what was a single family house built probably 30 or 40 years ago, sitting on the edge of a small wood. Through a dark, wood-carved door, we entered a anteroom with a large mirror set into a wood carved frame, which turned out to conceal the electrical panel. We stood briefly in the stairwell tiled, walls and floors, with the deep red marble I think of as porphyry, a fragmentary and possibly inaccurate detail residual from my days as an art history major. Up the stairs and onto a landing, also red tiled, we passed through another wood-carved doorway and found ourselves in an entry panelled, walls and ceiling, with still more hand-carved wood. It seems wood carving had been the hobby – perhaps even the obsession – of the man who had raised his family in the house. Throughout the flat, surfaces are panelled with intricately carved wood, the walls accented in places with gilt light fixtures, giving the impression that one has entered one of the lesser corridors of Versailles.

Off the entrance is a large room with pale timber floors and white plaster crown moulding – popularly called coving in Ireland – with a central medallion. A large window fills the room’s west-facing wall and opens onto a balcony overlooking what seemed a rather shabby garden, all of which belongs to the flat. (The downstairs flat has its own garden on another side of the house.) The balcony turns 90 degrees to run along the hall off which the bedrooms and a bathroom lie. This window-lined hall creates a south-facing gallery, which would be a pleasant place to sit in the sun on a winter’s day. More carved wood panels line its ceiling, these ornamented by carved and painted roundels about a foot in diameter, one of the crescent moon and a star, another of the sun.

The bathroom off this corridor is spacious and tiled with grey-and-white marble. One wall is fitted with cupboards enclosed by more carved wood panels. One of the bedrooms has a fitted wardrobe with doors upholstered in faded pink-and-white chintz set into carved frames. A second toilet off the flat’s entrance is tiled with more red marble and wood panels, making an elegant if slightly claustrophobic WC.

Of the five places we saw, including a single-family house by a creek in a Salzburg suburb, this is the only one that fires our imagination. But in the moment, it feels isolated, far from the city centre, at the end of what seems a scruffy neighbourhood. A funky neighbourhood, in fact. And, says Himself, we might be haunted by the ghost of the man who lovingly carved all that wood.

The Fortress

Stepping off the plane into Salzburg’s surprisingly intimate airport, I was struck by the encircling mountains, some of them rising steeply right there, immediately in front of me. They reminded me of the mountains in my birthplace, Salt Lake City, where, seen at least from that city’s East Bench, alpine peaks rise with similar abruptness and distinctness.

If the mountains ringing Salzburg reminded me of Salt Lake City, the city centre couldn’t be more different. My husband’s immediate boss, visiting Salzburg from global headquarters in the U.S., was taking us to dinner in the Altstadt. On the bus from our hotel, we eavesdropped unintentionally on three American women, each about 20 years old. Obviously in Salzburg for a study abroad programme, they talked loudly about their class schedules and living arrangements until the most vocal got off the bus just before we crossed the river. At the Karolinenbrucke, as the bus turned right, away, we thought, from the Altstadt, Himself and I panicked, just a little, wondering where we were going. However, we were simply entering an area of one-way streets, with north- and south-bound traffic running on opposite sides of the river. After two more stops the bus set us down near our meeting spot, and we re-crossed the river.

Now, for the first time, I could see unobstructed the Festung, rising above the Altstadt even more abruptly than the Alps rise over the city. Illuminated, its white stone walls shone against the black sky. The bulbous blue-green domes of the Dom and what seemed like a half a dozen other churches bristled beneath it, also shining in the darkness. The river gleamed with light on one side of us, the steeples and domes clustered on the other, and dominating the whole was the white fortress hanging in blackness, blackness softened by a scatter of stars and sliver of moon

It was good to meet The Captain again after nearly three years. He and Himself had worked together at another U.S.-based tech firm, and they had built trust and mutual respect over their nine-year-long working relationship. By recruiting my husband for this new position, he had launched our Austrian adventure. Besides which, I like the man. Talking all the time of old times and news of his family, he led us through the narrow passageways of Salzburg’s medieval core. Even now, several days later, there’s an unreal quality to the adventure. It’s strange to think of myself not as a tourist visiting an historic city but as a new resident discovering the place that will, I hope, become home. Then, that first night here, the experience was dream like.

We walked through winding lanes, nearly empty on a Sunday night, that every so often opened out into a wider platz dominated by sculptures under pyramids of glass. Above us, church towers topped with ornate domes clustered forest like. Nearer to earth, glittering shop windows cast diffused light through dim streets. In the windows, light glinted from thousands of brilliantly coloured surfaces: jewellry, porcelain, antique silver, stylish clothes and eyeglasses, dirndls and alpine jackets, leather goods and shoes. Others were completely filled with bright Easter eggs painted all the colours of a vivid summer garden. And everywhere windows shone silver and gold with the foil-covered marzipan-filled chocolate balls, the confectionary specialty of the city, Mozartkugeln. Over it all, high overhead but very very near, the white stone fortress floated, stark and bright against the black sky.

We ate that night in a restaurant supposed to have been in operation for over 1200 years, since 803. Inside, dark wooden panels covered walls and the low ceiling, while fresh tulips filled vases. We sat and talked long. At last we emerged into the night, entering the series of large platz widening out from the sheer cliff wall on which the schloss sits. The lights cast shadows on bare rock, making it hard to see whether the buildings are carved from it or sit flush against it or whether there’s more space than is apparent between the wall and the buildings huddled in its shadow. Light and shadow, buildings with their sharply rising steeples lit brightly from below, empty platz and darkened statues, merged and separated. All seemed surreal; only the floating white fortress rose clear and sharp and solid in the night.

Departures and Arrivals

Driving through the shrouded countryside on the way to Dublin Airport, I was aware of how much I love Ireland and of how much I will miss it. It is easy enough for an American visitor to love the gentle countryside and brightly painted towns. What came back to me during the drive was the emotional scent of my short stays here, the string of visits stretching over 20 years now, from my first arrival in 1988. The particular musk of the land and buildings recalled from those visits, the mixture of anxiety and regard I felt always on the last journeys to the airport each year, passports and tickets, paper then electronic, checked and rechecked, as we worried about shifting the bags from car hire return to departure gate, these sensations returned as we made our way in the darkness to catch the 6:45 flight to Salzburg via Frankfurt.

On our drive north in the early hours, I glimpsed fragments of road signs, place names written in English and Irish, quick flashing reflections in the head beams. Despite the darkness, I tried to picture the unseen landmarks, now familiar to me, thinking of how they will be soon, again, recalled not felt. It’s not that the landscape of Austria and Continental Europe won’t be as beautiful. Perhaps I’ll find it even more beautiful, but it won’t be felt as home, as Ireland now is.

One day earlier, I had been startled by a drift of light snow falling through dense silver morning fog. Lasting only 25 minutes, it was enough only to dust the yard. So I was surprised to see thick snow covering fields, trees, roofs, footpaths, cars and fences starting when we came to Durrow, a town about an hour northwest of our house in South Tipperary. The landscape was white and the roads slushy all the way to Dublin, where snow covered car parks and cars. Snow is not common here, and I had not expected it at all so late in February. The runways had been cleared, but the airport and all we could see beyond was covered in snow.

As it turned out, snow caused something like havoc all day. The aircraft we were supposed to board about 6:30 had been diverted to Manchester. It couldn’t get from Manchester to Dublin because of crew scheduling problems or because of heavy snow in England, I’m not sure which. As a result, our departure time was delayed until 11:30, which meant making our Salzburg connection in Frankfurt would be impossible. So they put us on a later Salzburg flight and checked our bags through. However, when we went to the boarding gate, it turned out the aircraft hadn’t left Manchester. Our flight was now pushed back to after 2, again making it impossible to make our Salzburg connection.

So despite having cleared security, we returned to check in and managed to get on a flight scheduled to leave at 12:30, though it was also delayed, a matter of 20 minutes or so. What’s more, they upgraded us to business class, a perk I’ve never received before, which meant we could wait in the relative comfort of the business lounge. Our luggage, however, had been tagged for the flight now scheduled to depart at 2:45, meaning it would arrive in Frankfurt after we had left there. There was nothing to do about that, they told us, except notify Lufthansa/Austrian Air’s lost and found when we arrived in Salzburg.

Our flight touched down in Frankfurt at more or less the scheduled boarding time for our Salzburg connection. All passengers from the flight boarded a bus, which took us to a point from which we could go to baggage claim or boarding gates. First though, we had to join the passport queue. Travelling on an EU passport is easy enough in Europe, but my anxiety grew as the line shuffled forward. A few metres along, we joined even slower queues for security. Their thoroughness, demanding every one take off all coats and jackets, belts and watches, methodically putting everything in deep trays, meant the line crawled forward. Our flight was scheduled to depart in just minutes. My stomach swelled with anxiety as people behind us pushed forward; others asked to jump the queue, claiming connecting flights.

‘We have connecting flights too!’ said the woman in front of us and I as we waved our boarding passes and shook our heads.

Just as I finally handed over my coat and handbag and lifted my heavy carry-on onto the belt, I turned around to say something to my husband. Instead, there was a stranger, behind whom I could see Himself.

‘We have connecting flights too!’ I yelled at him.

‘Yes, yes! But I have a phone call,’ he said, which seemed a non sequitur. He pushed forward, despite me. Furious, I grabbed my things from the tray and stomped forward, thinking to find a Lufthansa gate agent to ask that they inform our gate we were there. No good; the gates were up another level. I turned back and accosted the man.

‘Why did you do that? You have no right! We have connections to make too!’

‘But I have a phone call!’

It didn’t make sense, but neither did arguing. I was conscious of people looking. Making a scene could mean we’d be delayed even more. Himself was gathering his coat and belt from the tray, as we half ran to the escalator, carry-on bags bumping behind.

The gate area was nearly empty, quiet. We rushed forward. ‘Auf Dublin?’ said one gate agent. They were expecting connecting passengers. Through the gate and down steps and into another waiting bus, we went dragging the bags along, finally settling.

Across the aisle in the crowded bus a tall man with gold-red hair laughed at us. ‘Relax! No stress!’

I tried to calm my panting. I must have been red in the face. I nodded, ‘Yes. Of course.’

He kept laughing and talking to us, cutting across the clamour. He patted his stomach, saying something more about stress I didn’t get. Did he mean that it made your stomach fat, as some claim? It turned out he was laughing because Himself was only then able to buckle his belt. ‘I’ve been travelling for 30 hours,’ he said. ‘Relax. It will be okay.’

And he was, of course, right. The Austrian Air turbo-prop craft landed in Salzburg just as the light was turning the buildings gold. We came down the tiny narrow steps, and I looked up to see against the colourless late sky white-covered mountains in every direction. The airport was quiet, calm even, and, in spite of the pressures that remained, something like peace descended.

As it turned out, the luggage did not follow us. Last night they had no record of it at all; this morning they tell us one of the two is on its way to the hotel. We’ve bought a couple of toothbrushes, toothpaste, a razor and shaving cream, and Himself is off to the office to settle in.

It will work out, somehow.

Perspective.

Checking Joy of Cooking last night for a pancake recipe, pancakes being the traditional Irish dinner the night before Ash Wednesday (traditional because the eggs, butter and sugar had to be consumed before the privations of Lent), I noticed a recipe for Austrian pancakes, Nockerln. The authors note: ‘In Salzburg, when we were last there. . . .’ In the 20 years I’ve owned the book, I doubt I'd ever noticed the recipe, awareness narrowly focussed always on the more familiar. In fact, until recently little about Austria had caught my attention. As European states go, for myriad reasons, it’s hard to overlook France or Germany, Spain or Italy, but Austria always sat on the edge of my consciousness, tucked away, the Alps perhaps too lofty to scale.

So, weeks ago, when we became aware of the possibility of moving to Austria, I started looking at history books and online maps, refreshing my knowledge of the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, trying to understand how Austria fit into European history and geography. I realised how little I had ever thought or knew about Central or Eastern Europe. What’s remarkable is how different the map looks with the Atlantic and Ireland repositioned on the far western edge of the page and Turkey and the Middle East framing the eastern edge. Europe suddenly expanded, unreeling on the other side of the Alps, rolling away down the great plains of Hungary, passing mountain ranges and boggy ground I couldn’t have located months ago, rushing headlong toward the vast steppes of Russia and the Black Sea.

This week, in Ireland, though, I’m working through the checklist of things to be organised before the move, mostly involving paperwork and following through with bureaucracies: US tax returns (2009), Irish tax refunds (2008), filing receipts for the reimbursement for medical bills, and more. My husband is receiving, signing, scanning, and resending contracts and other documents. There are emails and phone conversations about shipping, temporary housing as well as renting a place in Salzburg.

There is another checklist, though, an interior one, directing my attention to sensation. The black roof tiles frosted as white as the rime-covered rough grass in the morning’s first light. One rabbit chasing another in the dim early light, dark form after dark form bounding through uneven tangles of wild grass. The tiny bold robin, head cocked, waiting two feet away as I scatter the day’s seed.

My mother-in-law’s dog, Sally, arriving first thing from next door to race through the house, claws clattering, eager to make sure we’re both here, before tearing out the back door and up the field. The sharp shard of yellow light striking the wall by the kitchen as the sun finally mounts the tall hedge to the east. The stab of light through the skylight, cutting a tilted square of brightness on the pale hall wall, warming the chill. The stark bare skeleton of an ash, branches and truck stripped to the bone by crows, rising from the hedge opposite my window, its spear-like upper branches scraping the sky.

These and more go into the album of the mind.