Why Don't We Learn From the Bears?

Seriously people, I think bears are really on to something with this hibernate-through-winter thing. Wouldn't it be great if, say, shortly after Thanksgiving we all retreated to our warm and comfortable, albeit musty, caves and curled up next to our loved ones not waking up again til the middle of April? What would we really be missing out on anyway? Christmas? Overrated. New Year's Eve? Such a bore. President's Day? Please. We could pig out all summer, go to bed fat and wake up thin and ready to party. What more could a little old person ask for?

As you can see from these photographs winter has already come to Berlin pretty much full force. I will always have way too much California/Arizona in my soul to think much of this season. As a child, I spent many a Christmas Eve swimming outside when we went to visit my grandparents in Phoenix over the holidays. In my East Bay adolescence/young adulthood we would talk each year about maybe going up to "visit" the snow. "Hey, why don't we drive to the Sierra Nevadas say "hi snow!" and then drive back home?" Sounds good. Little old East Bay me just has no need for it covering the courtyard of her apartment building....

I finally broke down and bought a pair of imitation Uggs today. Uggs stands most definitely for god-awful-ugly, but the darn things are pretty warm and I decided warm, un-stylish feet are better than stylish, numb blocks of ice posing as feet. Still, winter does have some highlights like Glühwein and taking the girls to Hasenheide for sledding. They say this winter is supposed to be the worst one in a 1000 years (go German optimism!!) so we should have plenty of frosty-building fun....

When the sun actually shines it's also not that bad. It finally did on Sunday and I took a little jaunt with Baby Li through the graveyard on Zossenerstrasse Ecke Blücherstrasse which is about a five minute walk from our apartment. Several famous people are buried there including Felix Mendelson and Fanny Hensel. So many art deco crypts and sculpture of weeping angels and Victorian wrought-iron fences that are deliciously decrepit and run-down. I had fun taking some ghostly self-portraits in the glass door of the old crypt below.

Yes, when the sun shines winter is bearable, but in Berlin it rarely ever does. Today it's back to leaden gray skies and darkness like when Sam and Frodo got too close to Mordor. The weather forecast says it should stay this way for a while. Nice. April is how many months away? Crap. I shouldn't even start having such thoughts. No matter what anyone ever says, no matter how excited people get about skiing or snowshoeing or freezing their asses off for some unknown jolly reason, this is my two cents:

Winter is for the birds!!

The Berlin Winter Blues

I have taught English here in Berlin to students from all over the world. A few times I even had some students from Siberia. A native Californian, I've always had a winter phobia that stretches back to when "winter" meant two months of some rain and a few days under 40 degrees. In the Bay Area, scarves and hats and gloves are fashion accessories rather than means of survival....Anyway, whenever I had a student from one of these far off, distant northern plains I always asked, with fear in my heart, "What is the Winter like there?" Invariably, they always answered, "Not as bad as it is here in Berlin!!" It's not that the days are very cold here compared to, say, Wisconsin. The problem is you never, ever see the sun. Gray day after gray day, the sky a ceiling of slate that feels like it's closing in on you. And though the temperature is far from as low as it would be in Siberia, there they have a dry cold whereas her it is a wet cold. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones. Nothing anyone likes, as you can see from a wan, drawn faces, but especially killer to someone who is from warmer lands. The problem is, I know it can be different. This winter has been especially hard. With two small children (one 20 months, the other 3 months)it is hard to even leave the house. Two snow suits, two sets of mittens, two sets of boots, one child screeching or, if I'm unlucky, two. Now more than ever my creative pursuits are a lifesaver. Not only have I been active "making stuff" I also try and add extra little touches for my own amusement. Like the two necklaces down below. To the one with the pink flower I added an angel prayer coin to the back, giving hope and watching over the wearer. To the other one I added a ten cents (Euro)coin. For those of you who don't know, the Euro is the shared currency of many countries, but the back of each coin is distinct to the country it is from (the fun of it is that the coins get mixed up after a while. It's always cool to see a different back and try and figure out where it is from.) The ten cent coin in Germany has a picture of the Brandenburg Gate on the back, which is what I have showing on the pendant for a bit of hidden local pride....Both of these necklaces will soon be posted in my etsy shop, Rose, red Rose which you can visit by clicking here

California

It feels good to be back in California. I've been here since Thursday and each morning after the intial fog has blown off I'm outside, sitting in the sun, like a lizard on a rock. I've been so deprived of sunshine these past Berlin Winter months and now I just can't get enough. The trip is also bitter sweet: my father is very ill with cancer and, since I live a half a world away, this will probably be the last time I will see him alive. So here I am, in a place so aptly called the sunshine state, the warmth of the rays on the skin not always enough to warm my heart....It's great to spend time with my family though and to have baby Mia hang out with them. I swear she now loves my mom more than she loves me! My second child will be here in October and it's so good to know that he/she will have two families, one in the Bay Area and one in Berlin, as baby Mia does. But sad that he/she will never get to know her grandfather. Both of my husband's parents are dead, so this means my children will only have my mom as their single grandparent. But she's great so they have lucked out. Anyway, this entry is a bit personal for this blog, which is more designed to document my creative life. Life is just too busy stirring the creative pot and I am doing nothing creative (though I do plan to get some writing done). Just tanking up on the sun and spending precious moments with my dad....