Joys and Shadows

I still have a photograph and a mental picture of meeting Gerlinde on the stairway of a gallery where Barbel was having an art exhibit.  I knew as we talked briefly that she was someone I'd like to know better, so I was delighted when she joined my Monday night writing group.

Gerlinde and Barbel, both German-Americans, have been friends for decades--both enormously creative women.  It's my good fortune that both made their way to San Antonio and I got to be their friends.

For several years, while Gerlinde was in writing group, I read and heard chapters of what has now become Shadows and Joys of a Life in Bavaria.  Even if I didn't know Gerlinde personally, even if we weren't friends, I'd still love this book and enthusiastically recommend it to you!

She tells stories with such vivid references to nature, food, people, weather, and places that I feel I've actually time traveled back to the 40s and 50s with her to her homeland!  Her memory for detail is amazing.

Her childhood on a farm, without TV and movies, eating what they grew and made without the luxury of supermarkets, wasn't an easy one.  Children in those days were not pampered;  they worked hard taking care of younger children, milking cows, cleaning, and feeding animals.  And yet--that same childhood fostered a life of keen observation of life in all its light and all its dark.

She remembers a terrifying stay in a cellar while American airplanes roared overhead during the last days of the war--such a strong memory that she is still afraid when she hears 4th of July fireworks.

What is most poignant is that she is able to recall not just what happened in her village, but she captures the point of view of a child who didn't yet understand much of it.  The reader goes back and forth from the imagination of a little girl to the mature mind of a woman who has saved these threads and woven them together in an unforgettable tapestry of darks and lights and color.

War, poverty, cold.  Abuses of some wives by tyrannical husbands.  Secrets, depression, suicide threats, frequent early deaths--these were some of the shadows.

And yet, threaded throughout the same childhood, are adventures American children of today can only imagine-like sledding through the forest and exploring forbidden places without permission or supervision by adults.

"You might say that [we] were poor.  But it never occurred to us to think that way...The woods and meadows, the barns and animals, all kept us busy in the make-believe world we created."

Children were not protected from death.  If they heard the bells ringing announcing a death in the village, the children would rush to the crypt to see who had died!

This passage, describing the tending to her grandfather's grave, is one of many that evoked  a sense of entering into an ancient fairy tale:

"On each grave a red glass jar covered a flickering candle to symbolize the eternal light of the deceased souls. On late-fall afternoons when I walked home from school, the almost scary dancing red lights burned eerily in the fog. They looked like millions of red eyes hovering in the mist."

At the end of the book, I feel like Gerlinde must have felt when she had walked through the woods with her beloved aunt, mesmerized by her stories:

"Tante Annerl's story-telling voice mingled with the whistle of the wind, the screech of an owl, and the creak of tree trunks swaying back and forth.  It seemed as if we were in a dark-cloaked magic space, and it only ended when we walked into the soft light from the windows of our village."

That's my experience of reading this book exactly!  I'm not ready to leave the "dark-cloaked magic space" of these stories--even for the soft lights of my own time and place.