Dear Mom, I am so sorry I missed both your 5th year memorial and  what would be your 93rd birthday January 9th.  We had a very bad fire last July 16th and our life changed.  We lost all the barns and their contents.  It was devastating.  Things will never be the same.  

But going through World War II like you did, must have been much, much worse.  Your teenage years, which should have been carefree and happy, were obliterated by dying young men, bombed out buildings and infrastructure, lack of food and sanitation and any normalcy imaginable.  You navigated through all that as best as you could, abandoned by your father for another woman and by your mother chasing after art contracts as an artist to generate an income.  And in the middle of all this you gave birth to me, bombs falling and a raid right after my birth and having to descend stairs into the bomb proof cellar in this condition.  You told me, you thought your insides felt like they were falling out.  My brain can understand, but still can't wrap my head around an experience like that.  That seems incredibly strong to me.  I was in Berlin in 2015 for the first time since my birth and I saw what was then the hospital where I was born in Berlin Templehof in der Lenzer Allee.  It is now an international school for children of diplomats, a very happy place.  But back then the war raged on and 3 months after I was born the Russians were advancing on Berlin raping and pillaging for the spoils of war, and it was time to flee.  You wrapped me into a pillow and carried me from Berlin to Switzerland on foot in the cold of March.  That was another act of bravery.  I asked you, why you didn't just lay me down in the snow and walk away and you answered that you just could not do that.  I think that thought had never even occurred to you until I asked.  And following all that where years and years of sacrifices on your part for me and my brother, who came three years later. Although many of those sacrifices were not appreciated then, I do think of them now and value them.  It boggles the mind, all you did for me.  Later in life you did find joy in the beauty and serenity of nature near Vancouver Canada as the picture shows.  I ponder with amazement with all the things that happened to you, you could find happiness in so many things in life.  A simple life, created and nurtured totally by yourself.  Whenever I need strength I think of you going before me and showing me that it can be done.  I miss you terribly.  I long to wrap my arms around you hug you for a very long time.

I had this picture in my minds eye, but could not remember where it was.  I scoured through a giant, gold on black cookie tin full of pictures my mother had left me and it was a lightening speed tour through her life.  All years, landscapes, boat scenes, beach scenes, beautiful buildings, smiling and laughing people I did not recognize, me, my daughter, mother’s favorite van, places all over the world, Europe, Central America, Asia, Australia, Canada, US.  Some were of friends travel, most were her own.  In any case a tranquil exercise while the storm of all storms, the atmospheric river,  is raging all over California, rain pelting, trees bending, humming birds fighting the gales to get to the feeders, but cattle grazing to get dinner in before the day is out.  It turns out those pictures were left overs and she had picked trough them and made up photo albums.  There was an album with page after page full of tiny pictures starting in 1926 on up to the 80ties, then empty pages, but then there are letter size prints, the digital age had arrived.  And finally two pages torn out of some album I still hope to find with very valuable pictures on them, among them the picture in my minds eye.

Probably just like her parents I could not make up my mind which picture I liked best, so I uploaded all three, as you can see in the Gallery. You can just see parents coaxing the one year old to pose fore the camera.  It looks like such a happy time.  No one had an inkling how turbulent her teenage years would be with the second world war breaking out and shattering her idyllic life.  Mom spent her childhood in the house in the village of Langenlebarn in Austria that I grew up in, not too far from Vienna.  It was built by her great grand parents, the parents of her maternal grandmother.  As I mentioned, I grew up in it as well, and my daughter, well, she visited and has no real connection to it anymore.  She was born and raised in the US, where we moved around a lot.  My brother raised his children in this house, so it is still in the family.  The plot the house stands on has gotten smaller, since the city annexed a part for a road, that has not been built yet in at least thirty years.  Also the plot is surrounded more by neighbors, back then there were wheatfields behind the house, but the house itself has been added on to and enlarged and upgraded.  Back then a living room, kitchen with eating area and a bedroom and inside toilet was great.  Back then you used a hand  pump to pump water out of the ground into buckets and bring it into the house, and you made a fire in the cook stove to heat the water.  But there is no going back.  I just wish my mother was here, so I could give her a hug.  She looks so sweet as an infant, looking out of the picture directly at me, at the beginning of her life.  Happy Birthday, Mom.