I So Need Some Greek Sunshine

Only twenty three days and we're out of here and if your wondering why I'm counting? Well that would be because here in T-Dot we have hardly seen any sun this summer, in fact this goes down in the record books as the soggiest summer ever... I think I vaguely remember two or three sunny days in July.

The tickets are booked and I can hardly wait. We will spend a total of seven weeks away and I'm off to Germany for two of those weeks. Last year I went to Wiesbaden.

This year I'm going some where I haven't been since I was six.

Before my parents emigrated to Canada in 1956 my Mom took me to her parental home in Greifswald to say goodbye to her family. Little did she know that she would never see her parents or most of her siblings again. August 13, 1961 Greifswald became a city behind the Berlin Wall and no one was getting in or out for years to come.

In 1946 my Mom escaped through the Russian sector to the west to meet up and marry my Dad. Because of that I was born in the west. Since the end of the war Greifswald would always remain firmly in Russian control and that last visit with me in tow was a little dangerous for her. But she could not leave Germany for a new land without saying goodbye.

In November 1989 when the wall came down my Mother was in hospital with Pancreatitis. She was too sick to believe what I was telling her. When she recovered I made her a promise I was unable to keep, that we would go there together and walk the paths of her childhood.

A number of things conspired to keep me from making that trip with her. There were always other thingsfor her to do. My parents made trips to Yellowknife for their grandsons (my offspring) wedding, trips to British Columbia, a road trip to Nova Scotia that I made with her. Then there were two knee replacements, my father's ill health and death and finally my hip replacement. And of course the building of her room onto our house took almost the whole summer of 2004.

Once we had Mom safely settled with us she was too frail to make that trip and I regretted not somehow finding the time and wherewithal to make it happen sooner.

The night before she died she spoke of "going home" and I jokingly asked her how she was getting there thinking she meant our home. She said "I'm walking across the bridge" and again I thought she meant the bridge on the way home. Checking some photos of Greifswald (compliments of my cousin) I now know that there is a bridge that separates the town centre from where my Mom lived as a child. Kind of makes me wonder...



Now I'm making the trip without her, a pilgrimage of sorts. To walk where she walked and to dip my toes into her beloved Baltic Sea.