Back at my moms house with 42 steps. When I grew up there I loved the fact that my sister and I had our shared room in the attic, tucked away from the rest of the family. The floor underneath, the first floor (in America it would be called the second floor) has the bathroom and 3 more bedrooms for my two brothers and parents. The ground floor (in America: first floor) is the living room, kitchen and a toilet (in America: powder room) and last but not least the basement, which contains the utility rooms, storage, the laundry room and the pantry with the fridge and freezers. Meal preparations means frequent visits to the basement, so you spend a lot of time hopping up and down stairs. Leftovers? They end up in the pantry in the basement. That’s where you also store your wine and beer, because it is always cold down there. Year-round! Usually the kitchen has only a small fridge, the size or a 30” wide cabinet, roughly 40” tall. Not enough room for the food of a family of six. That’s why you have that cold pantry room underground which is very handy: baskets with onions and sacks of potatoes, canned food, apples, etc. We always had a whole prosciutto and several salamis hanging from the ceiling and the smell of those cured meats was just mesmerizing! As a child I always hated to go to the basement, because it was dark and full of stuff. You had to walk through several rooms in order to pick up potatoes for dinner and all the rooms are lined up in a row, so you had to walk through the room to reach the next one and the next etc. For a child, the basement seemed huge, scary and cold! One room had the light switch on the far end next to the door to the following room, which means you had to cross the room in the dark before you could switch on the light. And another room had the switch behind the door in the corner where there were spiderwebs every time I had to go for the potatoes. And if you don’t know yet: Germans love potatoes! So we had potatoes several times a week. And one of the rooms had a piano 🤩 where I taught myself to play. That room had good lighting but was also freezing cold, so my piano time was limited until my fingers were stiff 😵‍💫🥶. Another room was my dads workshop and car part storage. If he didn’t work in his garage, he was in his basement workshop repairing anything and everything the whole neighborhood, all our relatives and his colleagues at work would need to be fixed or changed or repurposed. He was known to have golden hands! And then there was that room with a huge wood and coal fired furnace that heated the whole house! It was fascinating to listen to this ceiling high metal monster as it heated up those cold winter days. Sometimes we were asked to put a few more shovels of coal into it – another opportunity to visit the basement! Or, as my brother Jürgen remembered, one of our chores were to take the garbage not out, but downstairs. Meaning: it went straight into our huge oven! Anything from paper to cardboard, potato skin, apple pits, etc. went into the hot monster. Also my Guinea pig “Struppi”, that dropped dead overnight and my dad wanted to spare me the shock and gave “Struppi” a one-of-kind Guinea pig cremation before we sat down for breakfast 🥴. My least favorite time was when a big truck delivered coal or firewood and we had to bring it down into the basement. The wood had to be stacked up against the wall inside that room. Spider alert! Big, fat, dark, hairy spiders! They came with the firewood and when we stacked the wood, they would always scare the shit out of me. Did I ever mention that I don’t like spiders? That’s pretty much the only source of protein I would not try to eat! And maggots. Of course… Over the years the coal furnace left the house and in came a big oil tank, but that was installed in another room. The coal furnace room is now the laundry room btw.

So now I hobble up and down the stairs and remember lots of childhood details, habits and stories. Maybe that helps my healing?!? Anyway, we are planning our upcoming adventures and we look forward to those!