Heimgang

Outside of my front door and across the valley there are three castles each on their own mountain top. I'm living in an old railroad station and the train still runs in front of my house. There is a small road that connects the two closest towns. They are a kilometer in either direction. I am allowed to run all the way to the end of the dirt road where there is a giant buckeye tree. The farmer piles his hay underneath it and when I climb the very top I can almost touch the lowest branches of the tree. There are wheat fields all around my house and I am just tall enough to look over the grass. I love plucking the green and unripe seeds out of the field. They taste sweet. I have a giant backyard and my favorite spot is in the top of the cherry tree that leans just over the fence.

This is home - for now.

I'm allowed to roam, but my world is incredibly small. It consists of me, my mom, my dad, my brother and my two younger sisters. We are constantly on the move. My mom is an American citizen. My dad is a German citizen. I spend my time alternating between countries, but am mostly in Germany. We move every couple months. I am homeschooled. I am not allowed to cut my hair or wear pants. I have Bible study everyday. I have an existential fear of dying. My dad prays the devil out of my bedroom and I am terrified of walking to the rhythm of rock-n-roll music or dancing because this little girl knows that that is a sure way to go straight to hell.

Somewhere in the background of my everyday life the Berlin Wall comes down. There is a sister city program that is established between East Germany and West Germany. My family decides to host a young East German couple. The visit is inconsequential. I barely remember it. I am much more focused on trying to fold newspapers into kites and fly them down that dirt road or trying to find hedgehogs in my backyard. The couple goes back to East Germany and eventually their relationship falls apart. My mom sees an opportunity to get us out of whatever the situation is that we're in. She leaves my dad.

While most people are coming from East to West we go from West to East. I move to a city that's a thousand years old. It has narrow cobblestone streets and tightly packed old houses. In the center of it all, on top of a sandstone mountain, there is what we call a Schloss Kirche. It's a castle church. In those giant halls of that church my mom and my stepdad sing the Requiem every Christmas. It has huge stained glass windows and it smells like wax candles. I get to go to public school. I get to wear pants. I get to go to my first birthday party. My little brother starts taking cello lessons and I finally get to take ballet. Twice a week my little brother and I leave our house and we walk all the way down into the city center. We take turns carrying his heavy cello and I drop him off at the music school and then I keep walking to where I take my ballet lessons. The first two years are amazing. Everything is bright and shiny and everyone's full of hope and you can buy bananas at the grocery store. That is a really monumental change from before.

But things are slowly changing. When I drop my brother off at the music school I notice young men with shaved heads and black angry boots congregating. The former Soviet Union Union countries are following apart and places like Bosnia Herzegovina and Czechoslovakia are in Civil War. Refugees are coming into our community and more and more shaved heads and angry boots are showing up in our community as well. We are stuck somewhere in the middle. The same group that my parents sing with every Christmas starts gathering for potlucks in a church courtyard. We kids climb around the stone walls and I sit next to a girl that's my age and she's crying. Her dad is going to stand between the protesters and the refugees. Just the night before he had almost gotten hit by a Molotov cocktail. At this point it is me, my brother, my two sisters, a new brother and a little sister. There are six of us. My mom and step-dad bring food and then at the end of the night we walk down the dark streets and go back home.

Soon after, I climb down the wooden ladder from the loft bed where two of my sisters and I sleep and as I pass the bedroom window there's a big red swastika. My mom drives to Berlin to talk to the American embassy. What is she supposed to do? The answer is wholly unsatisfying.

A little bit of history: Germany doesn't have freedom of the press. That is a privilege that was lost in the aftermath of World War II. What that means is that all of the Neo-Nazi literature that is being distributed on our market square is being printed in the United States. The printer is going to be raided in the near future and the embassy is afraid that there is going to be a backlash on American citizens. In the city that I am living in that really just meant my mom, because she is the only American citizen. I'm sure it was a really hard choice but she decides that we were going to leave. We packed up everything we can and gave away what we can not. We give away our VW bus. We give away our trabant, a foxy East German super cute car that I'm sure is not made anymore. We give away my five-speed bike and our dog Sandy. I start 7th grade in Bartlesville, Oklahoma where there are no castles.

These days, I am working my ass off to build a house on the Northside. The four of us are living in a bus. It is me, my husband, our daughter and son. Every night after I go to my jobs, I do what I can on the house, and I crawl into bed next to my equally exhausted husband. Even though I am so, so tired I can't sleep.

Ivory talks in her sleep and Sylvan, he giggles.

Part of the reason I can't sleep is that they are seven and ten. World events are not that different from what was going on when I was their age, and those events altered the trajectory of my life forever.

The other reason I can't sleep is because I've lived in Missoula for ten years. That is the entirety of my kid's lives. It is also the longest that I have ever lived anywhere. I will not lie, there is always part of me that always wants to get up and run, to be on the move, to see a new place. But the thing is, I've made a choice to make this place home and to build a house here. My kids have friends that they have had since they were all in diapers. Even though our geographic world is so much smaller than what I had when I was a kid, our connections and our community is so much bigger.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please consider dropping it a heart, sharing, or reading my favorite vocal story: Permission. It didn't win any awards and doesn't have hundreds of reads but it is Oh-So-Special to me.

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