The Homecoming

In the summer of 1961, we left the United States to join my father in Aschaffenburg, Germany. The sun was warm and unblinking when Daddy met us at the Frankfurt military airport. The 14-hour trip across the Atlantic in a military air transport had beaten us all into a numb stupor, but seeing my parents’ joyful embrace after months of separation renewed our spirits.

We piled into an awaiting car and drove the 30 or so miles to Aschaffenburg and up to the nearest post canteen. There we got our first taste of wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, and brochen. This simple German meal created an immediate affection for the post-WW II locale where we were stationed to live for my sophomore year of high school.

Our temporary home, until we could get permanent housing, was the attic of a four-story military apartment building. All of the rooms sloped to accommodate the tile roof. The WC in a long closet held a lone toilet with a ceiling pull chain located near a skylight to a luminous sky above. All six of us shared a single washroom with basin and tub where we lined up and hurried to remove dirt and clean teeth. No one dallied or daydreamed in there; if you did, there were scuffles in the hallway and bangs on the door to “hurry up and get out. You’re clean enough!” There was a claustrophobic passageway from our living room that led to a tiny chamber with room only for a single bed. That room was mine. It was the first time in my life that I had the opportunity to be alone.

Mornings came early on that street in Aschaffenburg. Enormous American tanks pounded the cobblestone streets at 5:30 a.m. Would this be the day we grabbed the suitcase we kept packed under each of our beds for our getaway back to the United States? I was never told what maneuvers engaged my dad and the troops, but I knew it had to do with Berlin. All this activity seemed serious, but I was too excited about excursions to the village economy to dwell on my parents’ predicament for long. Within blocks of our barracks were quaint shops with fresh-baked bread, sausages, fresh berries and cream, dresses, and shoes. Street vendors dispensed gummy bears and licorice candies in rolled paper cones for mere pfennigs. Sidewalk windows shoveled out slices of steaming thin-crust pizza wood-burning ovens. I forced myself to converse in German and soon made friends with the local merchants.

As summer came to a close, Mom made friends as well and we received invitations from one of her Austrian girlfriends to forage her forested backyard for blueberries and learned how to detect the mushrooms we could eat and cook. We often filled two sacks with voluptuously fat berries and ran to her kitchen to eat them covered in cream and sugar. Anna buttered a fry pan and browned up the toadstools, which we ate on slabs of brown bread. At the end of most days, I walked to the library where I stuffed a cotton string shopping bag with plays by William Inge, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams. Alone in my tiny room at night, I became enchanted by the strength of words.

Over the next year, I made many friends on the school bus rides to the international school in Frankfurt. There was a social club for American teenagers in our village where we hung out, played music, and wore out the records of “Runaway,” “The Duke of Earl,” and a new dance tune, “The Twist.” But, when a new summer arrived, my Dad couldn’t face another year of bivouacs in the snow and long separations from my mother. So, we packed up our now family of seven and headed back to the U.S. Between the luggage and boxes of belongings we took was a fragile and new individuality that I would spend the next forty-five-plus years struggling to protect. That girl who arrived in the United States in the summer of 1962 was not the same person who left a year ago. This young woman realized that art, history, diverse cultures and food have much to teach us about ourselves. And making an acquaintance with myself in the midst of all I saw and read continues to be a source of authentic empowerment.