A rainy day in Europe

On this rainy day in Yellowknife, I am reminded of a rainy day many years ago when I was still in my twenties and spent a summer working as a kitchen maid in a hotel in Uberlingen which lies in southern Germany on the Bodensee (Lake Konstanz). It was my day off and I took a ferry across the Bodensee to the old city of Konstanz. I dodged rain while I wandered cobbled and winding streets, ate a bratwurst mit brot from one of the many outdoor stands and when there was a break in the weather had a beer at an outdoor cafe.  I sat under the overcast moodiness of sky in a square surrounded by stone buildings, gargoyles looking down on me, and wrote in my journal. In the the fresh smell of the rain overlaid by a vague sewagey smell and the smell of sizzling bratwurst from the outdoor stands, I was drawn back to the very early years of my childhood in another European city, Den Haag, where it rained often and it seemed that the rainy days, surrounded by my family and the sounds of my mother tongue, were the best and most secure of days.

I would visit Kontanz again later that summer with a boyfriend and we would spend an evening in a bar with a dog running unrestrained between the tables and we would meet an American woman and drive with her in a van across Europe to Athens, picking up young hitchikers from many countries on the way. We would camp in somebody's backyard with a bunch of other young travellers where there was a viscious German Shepherd who lunged at us whenever we left our tent and who would bite one of the others kids camped there. I would, in high spirits one night, playfully throw a piece of a sandwich at my boyfriend and he would never forgive me so that days later on a hilltop outside Venice, I would reach over and touch his hand and it would go limp and we would drive in gas stations in Yugoslavia and he would raise his fingers to ask for 10 litres of gas but only one hand would go up and we would only get five litres. We would camp on a patch of grass in the Greek hills and I would cry myself to sleep over this and wake up to the sound of a goat eating grass next to my ear, a peasant woman looking down from high above us. Greek police would chase us away for swimming naked in the Adriatic Sea and I would drop acid and hallucinate sarcophagi rising from the water. I would get stung by a jellyfish.

All of that would come later but that day in Kontanz, sitting alone in a cafe during a break in the rain, I was fully anchored in the moment and I belonged to Europe, to the rain, to my childhood, to the world.