Find Home

Day 20

of the 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge.

I am making plans to go to Germany for a few weeks. My husband and I are both German, and our original families are in Germany. Since they cannot come, we go.  I usually go twice a year, often I take one of my children with me. This time, it's going to be my son. He's quite excited. I just love being on planes, he says. The chicken-or-pasta question, the bagged blankets, the movies, the hairdryer sounds, the smell, you know, Mom. Yes, I know.

I kind of like flying, too. I think, what I enjoy most is the time. The time that I have for myself without any commitment. I can just sit and do nothing.

I often get the comment that I must be happy to go home. Indeed, I am always looking forward to come back to what I left behind, especially to family and friends, but also to all the sweet little things that make Germany Germany, like unique cafes, fabulous book stores, street musicians, the walking and biking mentality, the chocolate, the cheeses and breads, the sitting outside for hours. Men holding hands, women holding hands, and nobody is looking. And then all these different voices and faces; a bus driver with a turban said to me once that he never thought that Germany would be like this: a little United Nations.

I grew up with the diversity of people. In Germany you are physically much closer together than here in the States. This comes with problems sometimes, but nevertheless - being closer makes you more connected simply because you have to be. You have to get along because Germany is a small country. You have to make it work.

Yes, I am happy to go home. Whatever that means. Home doesn't seem to be a mere place, a location. I wouldn't want to live in my old hometown again, not even in Hamburg, the city I enjoyed so much and where I lived last before I came to the States. Where I live now doesn't feel like home either, even though I love our life here, I love the way how our family is here.

"Home" for me feels more like a google cloud, it is a vague conglomerate of strong memories and strong desires. The moment that beholds the very essence of this cloud is remembering myself as a young child sitting with my sister at my grandmother's kitchen table. We were having breakfast, sourdough bread with butter and sugarbeet syrup. And milk with a little bit of coffee. My grandmother never sat with us because she was always stirring in some pots. I remember her happy face while she was cooking, the apron she was wearing, sewn on her old Pfaff sewing machine like all the dresses that she had been sewing for us. The lids of the large aluminum pots were moving releasing steam and smells and bubbly sounds. The burnt matches on the stove, I liked how they tasted. Sometimes the radio was on. We were sitting at the heavy kitchen table with that screechy big drawer containing some nesting enamel bowls. I don't remember what we talked about during the times at the table, or if we did talk at all. I remember observing my grandmother, I see her back. And I remember feeling loved and complete.

All these thoughts I placed into this painting. The shapes and the lines of the city map that this little mouse is holding, reminded me of the pattern of the curtains  that were hanging in my grandmother's kitchen when my sister and I were with her. Maybe the colors were different but it was in just that delicate 50s style. My mom just asked me if I would like to have my grandmother's kitchen curtains but it turned out that she meant the ones that came on to replace the ones that I remember so well. Brown ones with bold orange flowers.  I will have a look at them in a few weeks.

"Find Home"
Acrylics, storybook cutouts and snippets, on canvas panel, 14" x 18"