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My favorite place: Weikersheim, part 2 (by Alty)
Weikersheim is a very old town, and a very small one. To this day, even if decades pass between visits, people still remember who I am, and who my parents were. It's home, and I feel like I'm coming home every time I visit. Sadly the last visit was over 11 years ago.
Cobblestone streets, most of them pedestrian streets simply because they're not wide enough for cars. Architecture that I cannot describe, it's something you have to see. A market place. Fountains everywhere. It's truly a magical place.
My mom grew up in that town. My dad was actually born in Hungary and moved to Weikersheim as a young child during the war. My parents were archenemies as kids. My mom's 10 brothers and sisters, my dad's 5 (not including my mom and dad), would fight all the time. When my dad was 19 and my mom 21, he asked her out. She turned him down, not only because they had always been rivals as children, but she felt he was way too young for her being almost three years apart.
Well, they started hanging out as friends, and one day they and a group of friends all went to a nearby lake to go swimming. My dad grabbed onto a tree branch to swing into the water, and when he landed, he landed on a log that he hadn't seen in the water. The log pierced his leg, the main artery.
He was rushed to the hospital and almost died. Considering the year, and the injury, he shouldn't have made it. They preformed a miracle, taking another vein to take the place of the artery. As a result that vein was very visible in my father's leg, and it wasn't equipped to handle the blood flow. It was something my dad was always self-conscious about because it was not a pretty sight. The doctors warned him that he'd have heart problems all of his life, but that was never an issue.
My father was in the hospital for over 3 months, in another town, Bad Mergentheim, a fair distance from our town.
My mom rode her bike to see him every single day, despite having worked a 12-hour shift. That's when they fell in love.
They married and 8 years later had me. I was a miracle child. My mom went through 8 years of monthly surgical procedures (due to a ruptured appendix when she was 18) in order to conceive. That's mainly why everyone in town still remembers me, because it was a huge deal when my mom finally got pregnant.
I grew up with loving family all around me, history all around me, buildings over 300 years old, and a sense of safety.
I still dream of Weikersheim. Just writing about it makes me homesick. I can smell my grandmother's house, the wooden stove in the kitchen, the aroma coming from the pig farmer across the street. I can taste the fresh bread that my uncle would buy every morning.
I can picture the table with the built-in cutlery drawers so that everyone could just open the drawer and get their own knives, forks and spoons. I can smell the laundry hanging in the sunroom to dry, the sawdust from my uncle's workshop in the basement. I remember with Oma [Grandma] putting salt in the garden to kill the slugs. I remember the heat and not being able to open a window because there's no way to put screens on these old houses, and the flies would bite you if they got in.
I think my heart will always be in Weikersheim. Maybe that's why I haven't become a Canadian citizen, even though I love this country, as did my parents. But, my soul belongs in Germany. It always will. I can't wait until my next visit. I miss it so much.
