Snow and Rain and Hail and Sun: An Easter Story

Yesterday it rained, it snowed, it hailed and in the middle of the day the sun was so warm and bright that I moved all the seedlings and flowers to the window to soak it up. All in one day. Every hour or so I would call HH to the window to see the next act that Nature was laying out, I caught flakes of snow and balls of hail on my sleeve and on a large browned leaf that had caught itself in the pigeon wire that laces our window sill and I held them out for him to touch for the moment they remained alive, before they vanished in their melting.

The first weekend of Spring put on quite a show. It was cleaning day in our house and everything inside was turned inside out, rugs rolled, furniture stacked in the hallway, papers and notes and maps and toys that had somehow migrated into the kitchen were sorted out and put into some sort of order, the floors were washed, sinks scrubbed and HH loved it. He loves to clean. The kitchen is my domain so I was hold up in it most of the day. It’s the room where we spend most of our time, not just eating or preparing meals, but sitting and talking, meeting with friends, painting in the afternoon and generally being.

At one point I came out and found HH on his hands and knees on the living room floor with a small white bucket of water in front of him, squeezing water from a wash cloth and rubbing it on the baseboard. His job was to clean all the baseboards in the apartment and he took to it with delight. I cautioned him to squeeze all the water from the cloth before he began wiping the wood so that it wouldn’t drip all over the floor. He looked up at me and with a short snap informed me that he knew how to do it. He barely raised his head when he said it; he was crouched in a compact bundle, both hands on the cloth, wrenching it with all his strength, carefully wiping the wood in gentle measured strokes. He didn’t need me to tell him anything about his chore and so I said no more about it and just watched him for a moment or two, admiring his grace and patience before returning to the kitchen.

We worked on like this through the day until after lunch when all of us needed a break. HH wasn’t in any mood to break however and had a bit of a meltdown. I try to keep rules to a minimum around here – the life of a four-year-old already has enough “watch-out”, “careful”, “don’t touch that” and “when you’re older” in it, but hitting and screaming are two things that will get him sentenced to a period of time-out and yesterday afternoon he earned one.

HH is a pretty happy guy and generally only hunger and fatigue will cause him to break down into a fit of stomping, crying rage. But there he was on the floor stomping and shouting – he wanted to keep working but neither Mama nor I had another wipe left in us. About ten minutes after I banished him things got very quiet so I gently opened his door and peeked in. There he was curled up on his bed sound asleep all wrapped up in “baby and blankie” and there he remained until it was time for dinner.

After dinner he told me he had a big surprise. He had hidden Easter eggs throughout the apartment and wanted me to find them. I looked at his mother with something like horror in my eyes. We had just cleaned the whole place and the thought of a dozen hard-boiled eggs slowly rotting behind seat cushions or tucked between blankets only to be uncovered when their stench found them out weeks later, wasn’t very appealing. Was he going to remember where he had hidden them all? She gave me a “take it easy” look as HH took my hand and led me into his bedroom. I shouldn’t have worried because one by one he took me to their hiding places, the closer we got to an egg the more he laughed and when I picked one up he shrieked. I don’t remember a better Easter egg hunt in my entire life. Layer the two of us watched a Wallace and Gromit video “The Were Rabbit” - fitting for the season - and then it was off to bed.

As is our custom, I talked to him. Last night he wanted me to talk about something new, something I had never talked to him about before and since this weekend is Easter I told him the one Easter story I have. It’s not anything I actually remember but it is one of those stories our parents tell about us – one of those events that my aunts and uncles used to bring up every summer when we traveled home to visit the relatives in Massachusetts. I still recall my Aunts laughing about it when I was a young man. I was about four – HH’s age – and my parents and some of the neighbors organized an Easter egg hunt. At some point in the day a neighbor dressed up in a giant rabbit costume and walked into the house. I was terrified and ran crying to my mother’s side, certain that this giant, fluffy beast was going to devour me. My mother, as the story goes, tried to assure me that it wasn’t a real rabbit, “It was only Roger in his bunny rabbit suit.” Those words have been repeated literally hundreds of times over the years – they are part of the script of my growing up, of my life, even if I have no memory of the event itself. And so last night I told HH the story and he laughed and laughed and made me repeat it for him. When he asked me to repeat it a third time I told him it was late and time to go to sleep. He protested a bit and then I reminded him how important sleep was and that when a little boy doesn’t get enough sleep he sometimes gets cranky in the late afternoon, like today for example, and so he rolled over, said “Good night Papa” and without another word went to sleep.

As I write this early in the morning, snow is falling, HH is sleeping and the house is quiet except for the taping of these keys. Another day is about to break, another opportunity to learn something about loving my little boy, and maybe, another story.

Spring Break

Easter is a serious holiday in Germany. The long, cold Winter has passed, Spring has almost fully arrived and the children have two weeks off from school. It’s like someone rang a fire alarm and the entire country runs away. This Easter HH, Mama and I packed ourselves into a small, rented car (and I emphasize the word “small”) and drove the length and breadth of Belgium. For HH and I this was new territory with lots of new experiences. Neither of us had ever been to Belgium. I don’t know how I’d missed it during many transits through this part of the world but I had. This was also the first time I’d taken a road trip in Europe during a major holiday season, needless to say it was also a first for HH.

I had heard of the dreaded “staus”, the monumental traffic jams that flattened autobahns into pastures of gleaming metal for as far as the eye could see, but I’d never been in one. I had, however, driven enough in Germany to witness the insanely high speeds of left-lane Germans in luxury cars but I’ve not yet grown accustomed to seeing civilians driving over 120 miles per hour. We spent the better part of our Easter travel time crawling in the far right lane with the Dutch recreational vehicles.

For HH this was all good. He is deep into the “why” stage of life and there were acres of new reasons for him to pop the question. People often joke about the “why” obsession that toddlers develop – some folks even find it annoying. I’m enjoying it because it makes me think about the world. One needs to consider carefully the answer to each question because first, it will likely be repeated in kindergarten or at your cousin’s dinner table and second, the next question will probably be much like the one before it and you can get yourself into deep trouble by sending a line of questioning into areas that are not yet ripe. The explanation of Easter was one such exchange.

It started with the traffic. We had somehow found ourselves in the middle lane, probably passing a Dutch RV, when a car came flying up from behind us on the left and slammed on his brakes because the car in front of him was unable to get out of his way fast enough. Smoke came streaming up from his tires as his car screeched into our lane. I wouldn’t be writing this today if the other cars around us hadn’t kept their cool while this knucklehead with more horsepower than good sense slid around the crowded autobahn, but they did and here I am.

HH was a little shaken by the encounter and the questioning began rapid-fire; “Is that car broken?”, “Why did that man made that noise?”, “Is he mad at us?” I began by telling him about traffic and cars and car-braking systems and how important it was for him to stay in his car seat and wear his seat belt. Upon further questioning I explained the reason why the road was so full of cars today and that’s when we got on the subject of Easter and why people celebrated that day and didn’t go to work and drove to Belgium instead.

He knew the basic outlines of the story of Christmas and baby Jesus so I started there. The difficult part was explaining the resurrection. In the last few months HH has been asking about what happened to his Opa and where he was and what does it mean to be dead and I had told him that being dead was not like being sick and that when someone dies they go back to nature.

I did my best to explain how the grown-up baby Jesus lived a long time ago and was a really good man and that he had died. But then something remarkable happened and he had come back to life and that he was the only person so far to have done such a thing and that it was such a wonderful event that to this day people celebrate it with the holiday of Easter. I don’t think he understood most of what I said but he didn’t ask why.

Soon he wanted to know if we were in Belgium. Given the traffic load, it took us much longer than we had planned to actually get to Belgium and he was beginning to loose his already strained patience when we started spotting light brown cows, unlike any we had seen in Germany. “Belgian cows”, I said, “Now we are in Belgium.” But the cows weren’t really convincing so the questioning kept up. “Is this Belgium?” The trees began to look different as well, the heavily cropped variety with bushy crew-cut style tops. But trees didn’t do the trick either. “Is this Belgium?”

At some point near Gent the traffic started to thin and the countryside took on a markedly rural flavor and aroma. “It smells different in Belgium” he said. And so it did, the farmers must have been fertilizing the fields that week because the “Eau de Moo” was pungent. It was in this setting that we spotted a beautiful if somewhat run-down Windmill. It was the first I had ever seen outside of a photograph and when I pointed it out to HH he lit up. “It’s just like on the paper Papa”, he reported happily, pointing down to the floor of the car to the paper bag containing his morning brötchen. There on the bag was a Windmill just like the one in the field before us and this served as confirmation enough that we were finally in Belgium. From that point on everything he experienced had a distinctly Belgian quality; the milk tasted different, the fish, the bread and particularly the waffles, which were light and crisp and when smothered in ice cream and chocolate sauce, a memorable experience for a three-year-old.

We spent the next two days riding in long flat boats through the canals of Brugge, sightseeing in Gent and playing in one of the most amazing playgrounds I’ve ever seen in a small resort near the coast in Knokke Heisst. We got home tired and cranky and stiff but this morning when he woke up, HH padded into my room and we looked at the pictures we had taken during our first brief holiday outside of Germany. “Belgium!” he exclaimed “I want to go there again.”


© German Diary 2007