Day 6: Windows and Wars, Sheetrock and Cement

This morning was the first morning I woke up feeling already alive. It usually takes me a block or two to really wake up. Perhaps my body is finally catching on. I walked out the door to a welcoming sight of dew-covered, rather than snow-covered cars. 

Along the sidewalks, I noticed daffodils beginning to shoot up out of the thawing ground. Soon a thousand tiny trumpets will announce the season’s arrival.

Around the first corner, a pile of yellow garbage bags signaled that today is the pick-up day for plastics.

Here in Heidelberg we separate our garbage into paper, plastic, glass, bio, and the rest. It’s quite the process and I often get mixed up, but I agree with the underlying initiative. I often worry, however, about the effectiveness vs. image ratio. Because going green has become such a status maker, such an image maker, I worry that corporations are coming out the greatest beneficiaries.

A sudden iciness came over my bare legs as the morning dew turned into a morning mist. There was no rain, but the air became wet like the rising mist of some distant waterfall.

I noticed a street sign at the next corner that reminded me of a recent vacation to Salzburg.

We were driving circles around the city trying to find our hotel when my Mom pointed to a similar sign and said, “I think we passed this sign already.” We all laughed as I explained that the sign means one-way street.

Down the street to the right, I spotted a house that has been being worked on for months. The renovation has finally become visible, a set of new windows. 

I’m sure, or at least I hope, more renovations took place inside, but the windows themselves must have been quite the project, having had to literally cut the windows out of the cement and then refill the excess void with cement blocks. Germans often criticize American construction for being out of wood and Sheetrock, vulnerable to tornadoes, fires, and floods. It makes perfect sense, coming from a people whose history has been a constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction with each war, to seek security. Coming from a less war-stained background, a part of me still prefers the mobility and re-moldability of wood-framed houses over lock down security. I’m afraid the day may come, at the rate we’re going, that I too will prefer cement. I hope not.

Down the street a few houses from the new windows, a little farmhouse, nestled between cement houses reminded me of how life was before war, before streetcars and stoplights, before roll-down shutters and car alarms, before cement facades hid the classic wood.

Now typing on my laptop, inserting digital images, and posting the outcome for the whole world to see, my sometimes excessive use and enjoyment of modern luxuries contradicts the inner longing for yesteryear this remnant farmhouse awakes. The Art of Walking is reminding me to maintain a balance.