Country Leisure and City Toils

This day began between six and six thirty a.m. for me. My automatic alarm clock had been activated because Uncle Pu and Aunt K. had asked me to house-sit for them in their home in the countryside southeast of Berlin. So I sat around in my nightie for a few hours, waiting for the laundry to be done, reading news articles online. Then, after showering and assuming diurnal apparel, I set off to the U-Bahn at around 9:20. I arrived in Halbe (a town that is sadly famous as an right-wing extremist rendezvous) on time, having finished Der Schuß von der Kanzel.

As I house-sat I played the piano, and lots of it. Chopin waltzes, mazurkas, polonaises, and nocturnes; short pieces by Mozart; little preludes by Bach; I played all with as much or as little volume as I wanted, as long as I wanted. I also read a delightful children's book by Enid Blyton, where six children and a dog uncover an evil scheme involving secret stone passageways, a gloomy marsh, and smuggling. Then I walked around outside; the copper beeches, regular beeches, oaks, and horse chestnuts are all splendidly opulent with leaves now, and rustled vigorously in the wind. Below them, the occasional lily-of-the-valley, clumps of pansies, dove nettles, yellow celandine(?), daisies, and dandelions in the tender grass. K. has a large kitchen-garden, with herbs like mint and lavender, rows of radishes, and a cluster of columbines, as well as a row of raspberries.

In the evening I went back home. J. was in the midst of doing his homework. He finished his English and Math homework with minimal help. Then he had to write a ballad for German, or rather not a ballad but something like Heinrich Heine's poem about the Loreley. After a while he decided to write a poem in six four-line stanzas in an ABAB rhyme scheme, about a man who falls off his horse. He began the poem in English (to be translated into German later) more or less as follows:

A man went riding through the wood
When he fell off his horse.
Rubbing his bottom as he stood,
He said something rather coarse.

Anyway, there was much more of this. In the meantime Uncle Pu (who had driven me back home) and the others were having a lively conversation over cigars, which made the whole homework process much less tedious. Then Mama took over with J.'s work, which was good because my German isn't up to snuff. But then I helped Ge. with an assignment about Mark Twain, which was not too bad, except that it made me feel about five times as tired as I would be if I were doing something less constructive. It's amazing how difficult, for example, it is to find an online photo with a decent side view of a Mississippi River steamboat of Twain's day. At any rate, I enjoy helping with some kinds of homework because it's a good opportunity to show off; but, for example, in the case of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer it's a risky pleasure because I haven't read the book in years.

P.S.: I'm not going to write anything about the French elections because I barely followed them.