Recall

After a cool, overcast week punctuated by thunderstorms and cloud bursts, it’s a sunny, calm and mild morning on Katzenstraße. I was up early to feed Jimi, the elderly cat of our neighbours, who are on holiday. He followed me, wobbling slightly as he does these days, into the gentle warmth of the early sun. Now, from the kitchen window in our first-floor apartment, I can see the brown-green fishing pond, which lies behind the houses across the street from us. No wind ruffles its smooth surface, which reflects the grey-green foliage of the trees that line the bank.

It’s a little after nine, yet the street is quiet still. A few walkers pace the path round the pond, their Nordic poles—very popular here—rhythmically marking their stride. A cyclist, red shirt flashing through the interstices between the houses, rolls by. The expanse of garden below the window is quiet; the blackbirds have settled into midsummer silence. Only a few birds chatter in the tall trees of the wood beside us.

In this quiet of this Saturday morning, I’m put in mind of our neighbourhood in California, in a mid-century development in the Newbury Park area of Thousand Oaks, about 40 miles from downtown Los Angeles and several thousand miles from Salzburg. How many thousand miles? I wondered yesterday but neglected to look it up.

I recall Saturday mornings in Newbury Park, especially summer Saturday mornings. The sun blazes on wide roads that meet, mostly, in orderly squared-off intersections. I had never realised how wide are the neat asphalts streets in that suburban neighbourhood until I moved to Europe. Katzenstraße, for instance, isn’t as wide as our driveway in California.

At half-past nine on a July Saturday morning in Newbury Park, the sun glares off the asphalt pavement of those wide streets and glints off the chrome and glass and metallic paint of the cars that are beginning to fill them. The early-morning (first light!) garage sales are well under way, with shoppers peaking about now, as the temperature creeps toward 90. (That’s about 30, for you in Europe.) Women pick up old crockery and examine the undersides of faded chairs; men pick through piles of books or yard tools or the detritus of a home office, watched with studied reserve by those eager to unload the goods. Car doors slam and an engine starts and another car joins the stream cruising the street.

Mockingbirds chatter their loud, complex calls, elaborate as blackbirds’ song if not as musical. The shouts of the Little League coaches and parents fill the air in the field behind our house, occasionally drowned out by the roar of gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Noise, as well as swelling heat, seeps through windows, inching under and around our blinds, which remain drawn against the sun. All the same, harsh light creeps along walls and floors, slashing the shadows. The neighbourhood is wide awake, and, no matter how late one or another of us would like to sleep, the sound of its routines breach our walls.

Lying in the coolness of the bedroom this morning, here on quiet Katzenstraße, I saw in my mind’s eye, as in a Google satellite view, the old neighbourhood. As if I hovered overhead, I saw the streets in their modified grid, block after regular block of broad, squat houses with low-peaked, pale tiled roofs. Illuminated by the relentless Southern California light, each was surrounded by concrete and grass, patios of paving stone, sprawling pink Queen Elizabeth roses, lilac agapanthus and brilliant fuchsia bougainvillea. I saw the shimmer rise from the streets and, from high above, looked at people moving about, doll-like, in the glare of the morning. A few joggers braved the heat, groceries were loaded into the back of SUVs, a man, body sleek and tanned, dove into the crystalline blue of a swimming pool. It seemed, for a few minutes, as clear and as immediate as if I were there.

It’s been four years now since I left our home there; I haven’t been back. The quiet neighbourhood where Katzenstraße is located looks very different. The heat does not, at least this summer, shimmer as it rises from asphalt. Time rushes on; what we left in California, then later in Ireland, is remote, the images dreamlike.

But every so often, like dreams, they return, and I inhabit briefly that strange half world of memory made vivid by imagination.

Even this posting is fuelled by imagination. It has been three weeks since the bright July morning I began writing it. Time again has been compressed. Mornings spent in German classes, pressing work and a slow-to-heal back injury have kept me from posting here. So on this rainy August afternoon, I am compelled to try to recall what it was I had recalled, filling in the gaps with imagination.

Imagination is sometimes the stuff of life.

A Question of Settling

I suppose the logical question is what did we do for the Fourth of July yesterday.

Nothing.

I worked, trying to finish a rambling, disjointed post (see above) before moving on to my German lessons. Himself was at the office, playing mediator between his European team and the expectations of their American counterparts who, of course, were all out of the office. We roasted potatoes and a sea trout for dinner and afterwards took a walk in the fading light, walking first under the trees along the pale green-blue River Saalach as it tumbled northward toward its convergence with the River Salzach, then turning back along the Salzach to home.

There were no fireworks. There will be a splendid display during Salzburg’s Rupertikirtag festival in September. We’ll wait for those. Nor I did not pull out the U.S. Marine Corps Band CD. No Stars and Stripes Forever for me, not this year. It was day like many others, a day on which we were grateful for dry weather, a comfortable place to live and loving companionship.

All this seems to answer another question, one that was put to me all the time while we lived in Ireland: ‘Are you settled yet?’

An unsettling question, that. A question that’s nearly impossible for me to answer. I suppose I’m a kind of unsettled individual, at best. I’m a drifting sort of person, unsure and aimless at the best of times, a girl who is still waiting to grow up, fighting all the same growing old.

An American acquaintance in Ireland, someone I knew causally over the two and a half years we were there, told me as we were preparing to leave that it was just as well. ‘You’ve never settled here,’ she said.

When I told him, Himself was indignant on my behalf. After all, we had our house, which we had designed and furnished with care. We lived among a network of a large extended family. We attended weddings, christenings, First Communions and, particularly, funerals. We voted. We had gym memberships and were greeted on the streets and when we went into shops. Who was to say I had not settled?

Yet, in a way, she was right. Such intimacy as we developed with others remained within the family. In some ways, we were waiting for life to begin. And then, almost suddenly, we uprooted and moved to Salzburg.

Have I settled in Salzburg, then? Can I even define what that would be?

Skirting the question yet again, I think back to when we moved to our house, our first house, in Thousand Oaks. Himself envied me, he said, because I seemed to take to our new neighbourhood at once, in a way he never did. It was the archetypal California ranch-style neighbourhood of irregular blocks punctuated by cul-de-sacs, neat sidewalks bordered by grassy ‘parking strips’, a neighbourhood very much like the Sunnyvale, California, neighbourhood I grew up in. It was so like our childhood home that my sister said on seeing it for the first time, wonder in her voice, ‘You live in Beverly Cleary’s house.’

That suburban community with it tidy, mid-century stucco houses surrounded by rectangular lawns and patios was far from the dwellings in the small Irish towns where Himself spent much of his youth. It was further still the rolling farmland where he spent the rest of it, the same countryside where I, apparently, failed to settle during our time there.

And now we live in a flat at the edge of a central European city, in a neighbourhood that cannot be termed urban, rural or suburban, having elements of all three. When we arrived, we had few reference points, architectural, social, cultural or familial. My circle of acquaintances is small; it is through good luck or magnanimous fortune that we have wonderful neighbours who speak fluent English, else I would have been cut off nearly completely.

And, yet, oddly, I have settled, if by ‘settling’ one means a sense of feeling grounded in my surroundings. More and more, when I look out the window of the flat or of the bus, or take in the landscape as I cycle to the market, I feel at peace with the scene around me.

I struggle, naturally, with learning German. Even though I make my way around the city comfortably, being unable to speak fluently affects me at odd times. When the phone rings – which it does rarely – I answer wondering whether I will be able to understand the purpose of the call. If it is Himself on the other end, my tension immediately relaxes. I put off making appointments, wanting to avoid those awkward exchanges in stumbling German with the receptionists who answer the phone. (Once one woman, frustrated with my incomprehension, hung up on me. I took a deep breath and called back to begin again.) I worry about what could happen if I found myself in a real emergency.

Sunday I participated in a 5K Frauenlauf – a fun-run – as part of a team from The English Center, an English bookshop and language school. Standing in line before the start of the race, I asked the woman in front of me, in German, the time. Disconcertingly, she answered in German, and I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t understand what she said. I am used to hearing German over loudspeakers, but I long for the day when rather than sounding merely interesting, it will be also comprehensible.

But still, simply participating in the race, albeit as part of a team of English speakers, created another tie between me and the community. All along the route, Salzburgers stood and cheered as we passed.

‘Bravo, bravo’, an old man shouted as I turned the corner on which he stood. That I certainly understood.

I’m not suggesting that by doing the Frauenlauf I am now settled. It was a single morning; afterwards I came home and slept, nursing the hip I’d thrown out along the way. I rose the next morning – the morning of the Fourth of July – and went about my business. Alone, as usual, for most of the day, I limped, my hip still sore, and wondered how I will manage the medical system here to have it adjusted. In America, in Ireland, I would know how to find a chiropractor and how to make an appointment. It’s not so simple here. It’s an example, however small, of how I have not ‘settled’.

All the same, that the Fourth of July, a date that should have resonated and made me homesick, passed without much more than a ripple in my awareness suggests an important, if subtle, shift in my consciousness. Being settled, like being happy, is a fluid state. I can’t define or describe it; I’m not sure I even know it.

All I can do is refer to the lightness in my being when I see the sun brighten behind the green wood outside the window. Feel the rightness in the sight of the corner of a familiar door reflected in the wardrobe mirror. Or know comfort in hanging heavy clean towels on the line. Sometimes, this simple peace is enough.