Still in Ludwigsburg.

Three days later and I might have forgotten to mention that it was February, your key did not click in the lock at exactly 5:00 p.m.. At 6, I started to worry. At 7, I called all of your friends. They did not know where you where. Then I called all of the hospitals. Nothing. There was a light snowfall that night, not even an inch. How was I to know that that was all it took to break down all of the trains. At 10, I took all of the heavy furniture and barricaded the door, right after I wrote you this note, (taped to the outside of the door)" Do not come in unless you are dead!!!

You continued to take the train, but you bought me a car and I landed a job with the Department of Defense Schools. I could not have gotten there with a train. The first complaint from the second floor was, "Frau Bartholomae, When you take a bath at five in the morning, you wake up my daughters." I had to be at work by 6.I tried to find some other way to get ready for work. It was not until later that I figured out that this family only took baths every Friday night.I can still hear that water running every Friday night, after we moved to the first floor when Herr Heidelburger died, in the same way that when sleeping and awoken by a train calling I get the shivers, because that is how my great-grandfather died, struck by a train. What is it about this bond we have with relatives we never even knew? And Europeans value water. We had to buy it for drinking. It was expensive. However, my baths were not given up.
Spring came in 1988 and every spring after. We would get up early on Sunday mornings and ride our bikes to the Pattonville,to the American golf club for breakfast. Then we would ride back to Ludwigsburg, go through the small villages and down hills with empty meadows to be filled with wild poppies come summer. We'd then switch to a route only for bikes along the Neckar River with about one kilometer with a nauseating stench coming from a plant which recycled toilet water and made it into drinking water. We'd stop at our favorite gas stations every 10 kilometers for a Schorle  and sometimes we'd split a fattening  Shweizer Wurstsalt  and crusty bread. Back to the bottom of the first hill by 2:00 p.m., where we would collapse on the green grass of Ludwigsburg's Freibad and swim a little. Lazy Sundays always led us back up that steep, winding, never-ending hill  to home. On the way back, there was one meadow where Gypsies with Mercedes and trailers came every year to camp out.I wish I had dared to stop and chat with them around their fires with that aromatic, mouth watering, spicy smell of something always cooking and mostly tended to by children.
Home brought us to a king-sized bed with German down feather beds and a dream of having children which did not get fulfilled for three years.It was not for lack of trying.