... to a City reunited

Jimmy and I are on our way to Berlin. We have picked seats in one of the little private six seat compartments German trains offer. This one is an "ICE" which has nothing to do with frozen water - as Jimmy pronounces it, but stands for "Intercity Express", and simply means it's faster. A single older woman has joined us, otherwise we have the place to ourselves. Jimmy has nodded off. So has the woman. Earlier we were served a container of mineral water and a "Laugenstange", a longish roll dipped into a salt solution, the "Lauge", and covered with sesame seeds, before being baked. It seems that was an extra service to appease us passengers over possible delays caused by current construction on our route to Berlin. These trains are so much more quiet than the rattly Amtrak, cleaner too.

Outside the window wheat fields are interrupted by corn, rye, and canola fields, now past it's bright yellow bloom. Rows of poplars, or low vegetation mixes of willow, elderberries, hawthorne, and birch, planted against the wind separate the large green planes. Small dense clumps of Forest too. As we travel further east those tall patches seem to expand. In the distance I see groups of wind turbines poking into the horizon now and then. We must now be in the part of what used to be the DDR - east Germany. There are still those buildings that ooze with a certain depressive greyness, architecture that holds in stone the attempt to enforce an equal averageness.

It is more than 19 years ago that the wall came down. I remember sitting in the living room among the large clan of my in laws. It was around Christmas. We were watching the news after an opulent dinner... and there they were: scenes from Berlin. The massive demonstrations, the uprising in east Germany. The wall had not come down yet, but it was already in the air, we could smell it was going to happen. I remember looking down at my belly, covered by a dark blue Romeo Gigly blouse I loved so much, round and bulging with a new life that was to become my first child, and all of a sudden I was moved by the magnitude of these concurring events. I had grown up with this wall separating our country. Grown up with half of the Germans locked up. It seemed this would never change... and now my child would be born into a world that had moved beyond the impossible. A world of people creating their own freedom. What beauty, what power that lay ahead of us!

Today am am on this train to visit my second child in this very city. A city reunited.