Winter

I have not been blogging in a month. It is partly because my adventures have tapered off as Berlin has been plastered with snow and ice since Christmas, partly because I am spending more time painting and cogitating, and partly because the longer I live here the less strange and remarkable things seem. I'm pleased with my creative work, still blissfully encountering a museum or two each week, but I'm caught up also in personal work and medical issues that are simply not fodder for public blogging, at least not here.

I have met more interesting people - a screenwriter, an actor, an actress, a head chef, an art historian (17th century Italian), an importer of Chinese furnishings, a graduate student in social sciences - and continue my friendship with the marine biologist (American) I met at the Goethe Institut. He has introduced me to other interesting scientists (all so young!); we brunch at least once a month. The screenwriter is very interested in my paintings and I send him new images as I get them made; he responds with very interesting, intuitive feedback. I have lost touch with the sports psychologist.

I have a whole slew of new, sometimes-stupid-beyond-belief dog names from the dog park - Paul (for months I thought it was "Powell"), Phil, Spike, Freida, Frodo, Bones, Cacao, Jimmy, Lumpy, Carlos, Laddie, Fido, Lucy, Murphy, Suzie, Celia (Suzie and Celia are particular new favorites of Maggie's), DuBeaux, Nyla, and two more Kieras (bringing that total to seven). They are all loving the snow, which falls endlessly, it seems, and which they delight in eating and rolling in. I have given up on ever retrieving my old glasses.

The snow brings out droves of parents with children on sleds - high-centered ones, very different from the Flexible Flyers or saucers that American children travel on. The Volkspark is well used, having some great sledding hills. I have to say that I find German children for the most part to be adorable (cutest hats ever!) and well behaved, and I have never heard anyone speak sharply to a child here or exhibit any sign of anger or annoyance. Parents seem infinitely patient and infinitely delighted with their offspring, and the fathers are as much involved as the mothers. There is a cafe near me, "Cafe Paul & Paula", that caters to people with young children, and seems to be run on the principle of common sense so lacking in the States. I am often tempted to go in and offer my services as a surrogate grandmother. Children crawl on the floor and play with common toys while their parents sit at low tables drinking coffee and tea (yes! hot liquids near tiny people!), and during the holidays there were even real candles burning in hurricane lamps on the higher tables. Imagine THAT in the States, where everyone sues everyone else for the slightest mishap they themselves might have prevented. Oh, sometimes I dread going back to that particular brand of insanity. Others, too...

The lack of threat of civil suits here has a downside, however, at least in this weather. Apparently it is quite unclear as to who is responsible for the state of the sidewalks - the city, the building owner, the tenant, or manager - so everyone is reluctant to spend their resources in dealing with the ever-increasing ice-scape that is developing through this winter of snow-snow-snow-freeeeeeeze-melt-freeeeeze-snow-snow-freeeeeze-melt-freeze. In some (most) areas it's like trying to walk on a Lilliputian version of the Himalayas. The clinics and ERs are stuffed with people who have fallen. I've fallen once myself - no injury except to my sense of equilibrium. There's no point in embarrassment, as everyone else is falling, too. There are varying degrees of effort made to sprinkle sand and gravel, but by not clearing it all up after the first big snowfall at Christmas, they have allowed it to pack unevenly and freeze over to a point where it now requires major labor with pickaxes and shovels to budge any of it. Some cars which haven't been moved in weeks, are now cratered by at least 8" walls of ice and couldn't be moved without a tow truck. They've run out of salt for the roads and are now importing it from Morocco, and some weather reports say this will last through March. It does keep the maniacal bicyclists off the sidewalks, for the most part, but the joggers keep jogging and the baby strollers keep strolling. I do find the white landscape to be bright and cheerful, much preferable to the darkness of soggy winter mud, so I'm not entirely disheartened by it all, only to the extent that it discourages me from getting out and about as much as I would like. I feel like I live in Narnia under the rule of the Ice Queen.

But not getting out and about means I am spending more time painting, and listening to audiobooks and podcasts as I work. Anyone who's ever read Julia Cameron knows about "morning pages" and these I write assiduously. This combination of painting and writing is allowing me to move great quantities of psychic baggage from the overloaded storage unit in my brain and fling it out into whatever receptacle the universe provides for such detritus. May I please never see any of it again. And if Berlin isn't the most symbolically perfect place to be undertaking this labor of personal integration, I don't know what is.