A smile at the Kaiserstuhl (English)

Well, here I am again with the English version of my German story.Time flew these past weeks, although in the beginning I often thought: What on earth am I doing here at this moment? Is it good for anything at all? But yes, it was; especially for the kids. I haven't gone anywhere on my own, no Crazy Crocodile Explorations in Germany this time, mostly I was at home with my friend Lydia and the children.
During the first week I went outside a lot with Silas (6), the youngest and we played in the playground down the hill or we went to see the pigs, his favorites! Or we went up to their garden in the vineyard-hills or stayed at home to play with the Lego's or the wooden castle I had bought for them.
By the way: my journey to Bötzingen went very well. I didn't drive fast though, maybe only 90 kilometers on the average because I often stayed behind trucks and pauzed every 100 km. It was an easy route, I only had to drive straight on all the time.
On Thursday afternoon the grandparents came (Wolfgangs parents), so I met them, too. Every now and again I could help the older children: Micha (8), Lukas (10), Lea (12) and Joas (14) with their homework, mostly languages and it was nice to be able to 'teach' them a little bit.
In the evenings, when the youngest two had gone to bed, we often watched a movie together: a fairytale (those we watched in the afetrnoon with Micha and Silas, too), a western (Karl May-series, James Fennimore Cooper books or Terence Hill)or a Chinese movie (Joas loves those of Jacky Chan and he had had his birthday!).
Before I went to sleep, I worked on the summary for my cousin Marc of the book he had given me in New York.
On Friday when the kids started to paint with watercolors I joined them and made a painting of a family in an Irish landscape. Later I put it in a frame for them.
Other activities: baking cakes, sewing skirts, doing games with the kids, making music with Lydia and Lea (old church hymns mostly), playing volleyball in the courtyard and going for walks on Sunday afternoons. Sunday was the only day off for Wolfgang, so then we took the kids for an outing after Wolfgang had read from the Bible and discussed it with the children. Then we went for walks in the woods or the mountains, climbing to a tower for example. For that reason I didn't go to church on Sundays but on Thursdaynights. Well, that is to say: if there was a meeting. The meeting was cancelled twice: once because of the tempest and the second time for a workparty. But then I was invited at Karl and Ingrid Meier's who live with their many kids in the Bergstrasse. Then we had brotherhood together and that was very good. Old sister Meier (Karl's mum) remembered the first time we visited them with the Westermanns very well, that was many years ago.
In the afternoon we made music together. I had brought my violin with me and Lydia and Lea played both guitar and piano. We played songs from the church songbook 'Lieder des Lebens' or old religious songs from the 18th and 19th century, sometimes for two voices. Together with Lea we taped some songs on cassette once.
One day we watched an interesting movie about the Bushmen in Botswana, 'The gods must be crazy' and a nice movie about nature on Vancouver Island.
O Tuesday January 23rd I went to Freiburg in my car with Lydia, Silas and Lydia’s older sister Elvira. Fortunately it didn’t start snowing until later that day. The following days I had lots of fun playing in the snow with the kids. In the mornings only with Silas, we built a snowhut in their garden, and in the afternoon with all the other kids, too, those from the neighborhood, from school and from the church, all playing together. Isn’t life easy if we are like children?! We took sleighrides down the slope, sometimes even with a big rubber tire, that went so well. But it was hard to steer so on the way down a lot of ‘passengers’ flew off!
We also had snowball fights together, sometimes even five to one and I tried to smash those snowballs in the air, therefore they called me ‘karate-woman’! My sister should have known! (She is a real one, not me!)
On Thursday evening was my first opportunity to go to a meeting and I fully enjoyed it. It was about having the testimony of Jesus over your life and to please God in your thoughts, and to get used to that from your earliest youth on. God looks to the heart. Our service must not become a religious stress, brother Tombre has said: a good measurement is: is rest coming forth? After the meeting I talked a while with brother Paul Ruf. I didn’t know that he had moved to Bötzingen (again) with his wife and children!
On the 28th I went to their (the Jäger’s) meeting for the first time. I wondered, how someone, who has been in the church, could ever feel at home in such a place. Yes, they were nice, most elderly people, but the message…. Ah well, I ‘got my share’ indeed but that was enough. In the afternoon we went for a walk with the children in the neighborhood of their home. We went up to a hill where there had been a castle (‘Zwingburg’) with a cruel story from the Middle Ages. No wonder, when the cruel Swiss knight had died, that the farmers of the neighborhood tore down the castle with their bare hands and rebuilt their own houses.
For my friend I cut out a NICE knight’s tale with a pair of nailscissors. It took me three days but it came out very nice.
On Thursday March 1st we did a day of ‘intense’ shopping: in the morning to Freiburg and in the afternoon to Breisach (near the French border). In the evening I was invited to come to the family Meier again for dinner.
On Friday Katrin Merkle-Wissler came to visit Lydia with her youngest son. So Lydia still has contact with people from the church. I was happy to know that.
During the weekend Elsbeth, Lydia’s other sister came to stay over for the night with David, her husband and their daugther Martine (7). Debora, another cousin came with her mum (Elvira) and we celebrated our (delayed) birthdayparties together with Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and a lot of ‘Gemütlichkeit’!
On Sunday the 4th of March we couldn’t go to the Schwarzwald (‘the Black Forrest’), as we had planned, because Lukas was sick. Later on he turned out to be the first one in a row; on Monday, when we came back from a secondhand shop in Umkirch, also Silas, Micha and Lea started throwing up and having diarrhoea. I thought I could stay out of it, but the night before I had planned to leave, 3 o'clock at night it was my turn, so I couldn't drive home the next day!
I stayed for two more days, like everyone there had wished and hoped for so eagerly (they wanted me to get stuck in the snow ad stay for another year or ten, like Micha said) but after Lydia had taken such good care of me (she is a doctor’s assistent, you know!) I was ready to go home on Thursday. My little horse Ardanwen (=my car) felt like it, too. On the way back he even learned how to ‘gallop’ (until 130 km/h) because he smelt the stable! And because of the fact that enough angels were aboard, we arrived home in De Meern safely at 8 o’clock that evening.
Well, that was my German adventure. Now on to the next one. But first of all some time here... at home. Or well, in Holland. There is still a lot to prepare and take care of before I go on. See you all later.
Greetings from the little Crocodile