For today not much words, just two pics from the last holiday trip my parents made in their life...
and one from an adventurous trip Anna made with me.
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Blue - blue is a color, but it can also mean a sad feeling. It's also part of the word "Blues". By the way my favorite kind of music.
Blue(s) - this is a picture I wore a blue night dress and it was the saddest time of my life, shortly after my father died. I felt so sad that I thought I had to die of sadness. My heart was heavy. It felt like a stone in my chest. Blue(s)... The world looked strange to me. It looked the same as it always looked, but my father was missing in this world and so it was a strange world to me.
Blue(s)...
A blue picture of me.
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Regular participants are:
Ree
and me. Feel free to join us!
Part 1:
I think, this is a quite normal interpretation of today's topic: Some branches and the sky behind them. Because of the contrast between dark wood in the foreground and the bright sky the picture hasn't got any colors, seems as if it were a black and white photography. The blurry part is a little snowflake that fell on the camera lens.
But I were not Georgia if I wouldn't go crazy sometimes:
Part 2:
When going through my photo archives I found a lot of old pics I never published before and It would have been a pity not to show them, because you always see my "new old house" in the background.
In front of the house in the late 1930ies. It was my great grandfather's 70th birthday.
1: grandfather Fritz, 2: my father Georg, 3: father's elder brother Fritz, 4: grandma Anna and her mother Karoline (left of her), 5: great grandfather Fritz
The little boy with the white apron is my uncle Karl and behind him the girl is his sister Luise. They are the only ones on the pic who are still alive.
This must have been shortly before May 1943, when my father's brother died. He (left side) and my father (right side) are sitting at the back seat of the horse carriage. On the stairs there are standing my grandfather (closest to the carriage) and my great grandfather (near the sign at the door). The man in a suit must be my grandmother's youngest brother Georg. The woman must be his wife Karoline. My granny was probably in the kitchen, preparing dinner.
Village feast at the same time: They played a lot of music and went around in the village. In the evening there was dance.
The house in 1959 with the new Veranda in front of it. My father colored the pic with some crayons.
Great grandfather inside the house. We still have the sofa, the cupboard and most of the pictures.
It is currently in the cellar of my other house and waiting to move back to where it belongs. This pic was taken one year ago.
Part 3:
No photo, but it is black and white and it says: Have a wonderful week!
If you want to make your own, you can get it here:
http://goqr.me/[Insert%20text%20here]
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There are some people I dearly love, but I chose my father's picture. My daughter wouldn't want a picture of her in the internet, which is up to date.
True love never dies.
After a lot of absolutely strenuous weeks the kitchen is at least done. The furniture is still missing, but the furniture will follow after we hopefully once sell our house in Driburg. Sigh!
Here are some pics:
View to the dining table. This is not the table that will stay there, but as long as we don't have our furniture in this house it is a good alternative. And it is made of the same wood. Also the chairs are not those that will stay there. Look, they are all different. Later there will be place the old kitchen table and chairs of my grandmother.
This is a detail, where you can see the curtains I sewed last Monday and the big white window sill and the little blue closets. Formerly there was simply no window sill. It is very nice sitting there having additional space to place some plates or bowls on the window sill when you are eating at the table. Or you can place a book or a magazine there while sitting in the kitchen.
And this is the other direction. You can clearly recognize where the kitchen furniture once will be placed. I layed wall tiles for the first time of my life and there was nobody who helped me or gave me advice. I am very pleased with my work. For me it looks great. And it was a difficult job, because the wall is bumpy. So was the floor. It was simply horror. The floor was puzzled together of many different boards, all repaired for several times and it is bumpy like a rollercoaster. It was a piece of art laying the carpet tiles. The lighter ones are washable vinyl tiles. So it will be no problem if for example an egg falls down. The rest of the floor tiles are smooth and cozy, but very tough. On the right side of the picture you see a small part of the door. It is as old as the house and still has his old metal fittings. I painted it white at the kitchen side and terracotta from the hall side.This corresponds to the oldest state of the house.
O dear, I nearly forgot: Just to compare! Here are some photos how the kitchen looked like before.
It was all brown and the walls were covered with wood.
What else did we do?
Well, my daughter denounced the rent contract of her apartment in Kassel, so we moved all her things and furniture and I renovated the entire flat.
This is why I was a bit quiet. I simply didn't know what to do first. Now my holidays (what holidays!?) are nearly over and I haven't had a single day of recreation. I am very curious about how much a person can work without any break. I'm just testing it...
Today I placed my daughter's drawing material (architects always have to draw huge plans) in the closets and on the table on the attic where my father formerly had his workplace for painting all the hundreds of paintings and drawings he left us as the most valuable present after he died five years ago. I couldn't stop crying while doing this. Another place where his spirit is gone. Only in the cellar all things are lying around in the typical way he left them. And when I go there I think he must come around the corner. But we can't live in a museum. This is what my father often said himself, when we talked about what would be if he once would be dead. And this is what he said when he did the same job I am doing now, when his parents had died and he had to put away all their things in the house. I know all this, but I couldn't stop crying. It hurts so much, still after five years and I don't know if it will ever get better. I miss my father, every second of my life. Love never dies.
It has been a stressful time since we moved. My job doens't let me any time for getting through that mess and if there weren't Anna, who fixes all when I'm at school, we would still live in a complete mess.
Every single day is filled with work from 5 o'clock in the morning until night. Because we can't move the furnishing of the rooms in Driburg (it doesn't look very attractive for a buyer if a house is completely empty) we at least try to move our personal things like our clothes, our books and computer we need for working/study, our computers, shoes, jackets, files and documents, family pictures and so on. Every day we move another part as far as it fits into my car.
We also officially moved: We are now citizen of Diemelstadt, where Wethen belongs to, Hesse. We are back to the place our ancestors lived for hundreds of years. It feels good!
In the meantime a lot of deliveries were made: Fittings for the bathrooms, a small scaffolding for the work on the high ceilings in the house, the bathtub, three sinks, a shower, four toilets, carpet tiles, floors for the bathrooms, wallpapers, drapes and so on. It piles all up in the two garages and our personal things pile up in the first floor. Sigh! And no time to get all this work done. I even haven't had time for ironing our laundry, which also piles up higher and higher.
Today actually Anna's car should have been ready for fetching it from Duisburg. But the vehicle registration office works as slow as a snail. So we still have no license plates. Hopefully we can fetch the car on Friday. We already bought tickets for the train to Duisburg. It is a journey of about 2,5 hours. We decided to travel first class, because we want to be left alone and have a comfortable trip. Then we have to drive the new car back to our home, another 2,5 hours!
Last week I bought an old desk for Anna's living room to be. She wanted to have a Chippendale coffee table, nothing else. So I bought one at Ebay. It's a nice dainty table with carvings and wooden network under the glass plate. It is about 60 years old. So it is just what Anna wanted. We drove to a small town in the Sauerland, Meschede, to fetch it. For heaven's sake! You don't guess how small and winding the roads are in the Sauerland. And you drive always up and down the steep hills. We were very glad being at home again after about 4 hours in the car. Several construction sites and closed roads forced us to go long ways round. But at least the table was in our old new house in Wethen. No, I wouldn't like to live in the Sauerland. There is nothing apart from hills and trees, nothing! OK, it's a wonderful landscape, but living there is not very comfortable on my opinion, above all not in winter.
Sauerland
Today I had a little time to clean Anna's table and to treat it with furniture polish. Here it is:
Last weekend it was my parents' birthday. My father would have turned 87 on Saturday and my mother 84 on Sunday. On this occasion we did a completely new planting on their grave and on my grandparents' grave. We planted heather and asters. Also the garden in Wethen had to be done. It is now prepared for winter.
My parents' grave
And not to forget: There was an email of Mike Richwalsky, formerly of Erie, who asked me, if hecould reprint my story of Erie's sleeping beauty on his site "Erie Blogs". I feel very honored that he published it on his site despite my really bumpy English. I must admit that I'm really proud.
It's your 84th birthday today, Papa.
I love you and I always will.
I miss you.
Yes, I know, I know...I'm too busy for updating the blog and I'm too busy for answering emails. But you are all not forgotten, it's simply too much stress at the moment. My job is murderous and so are my duties in the family. I'm also still working on a post about the fairy tale Rapunzel, because I promised to do so. Hopefully there will be a little time this weekend for catching up with al this stuff.
But we finally found a tombstone for my father. I didn't want something too common, but also something sober for him. Yesterday I had this idea and hopefully it will be manufactured soon. The tombstone consists of two simple plates of grey granite, just two rectangular polished plates. Papa's name will be written in bronze letters on one of the plates. So far it is really plain. But the eyecatching center is a huge bronze cross, which stands alone between the two plates and optically joins them and protects them, because the cross is higher than the two plates. The cross is hand made of bronze and decorated with leaves of bronze, which are patinized in a fine bluish green. When I saw this cross I had the idea for the tombstone.
Here is my design:
I already dealt with the sculptor and only my mother's OK is missing. She shall think about the design another 3 or 4 days, but she liked it, too. To be honest it was the first design she liked after hundreds of suggestions. For me it was the same: I didn't like any of the tombstones which were displayed at the sculptors in our region or in dozens of catalogs.
*Sigh* I hope that this is a big improvement.
I'm crying very often at the moment - it hurts so much. I don't want to design a tombstone for my father. I want him back. I miss him so badly. I even can't believe that he is dead since 1 1/2 year. I can't cope with this. He was the best that happened to me apart from my daughter of course. Since school has begun I'm sitting in empty classrooms during the breaks because I am crying. And then I have to go into my classroom and pretend that all is OK with me... and more than thirty pairs of eyes are watching me.
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Picture: Drawing and idea by Georgia; all rights reserved
I just fixed these four pictures on the wall. My father painted them long ago. They were in my bedroom when I was a child. A fifth picture is missing. Once I took it to school, when we talked about birds. I was 7 years old. The teacher - I liked him very much, he was a kind man - never gave the picture back to me. I do understand why. They are too beautiful. I hope the fifth picture is still hanging anywhere in his rooms, if he is still alive...Mr. Meyer from Duisburg...I liked him very, very much. He was a good teacher.
I'm crying, because I miss the most amazing person I ever met: My beloved father. My father loved birds and he always dreamed of being able to fly. His dream was to be an aeroplane engineer, but WWII led his life into another direction, so he never constructed aeroplanes and he never travelled by plane. I'm so sorry, that this dream of his life never came true, but on the other hand this saved his life during WWII. If he would have become a pilot, he would probably not have survived. His high blood pressure saved him. - I miss him every day, every hour, every second...
...Love is a losing game...
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Picture: Taken by Georgia; all rights reserved
I love you, I miss you, Papa.
*September 17, 1927, in Wethen; + April 30, 2007, in Wethen.
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Pictures: All rights reserved
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