sancho H

We blew up a bag of old balloons for my grandmother’s party. They burst sporadically with loud bangs in the warm days that followed.

My grandmother (Omi) turned 90 last Sunday and we travelled to Vienna to celebrate with my extended family who I know very little and who know me only as very little and blonder. On the first day my sister accompanied us to the graveyard in the small village where my grandparents were born. Pertl is engraved on every fifth gravestone - the ancestors that I can not connect and who may have crossed over from Bavaria. Grander ideas link us to Mozart, whose mother was born a Pertl. The Pertl women that I know well are alpha women with one hand in the soil and the other raised in command or whisking up a cake. Half of me is like this and the other half is in the city, comfortable on trams and in coffee houses, familiar with the stern faces of waiters, seeking formal symmety, enjoying the convoluted street walks. Honey, quinces, a suitcase of books, forget me nots in a rounded vase.

Red socks for our new step-stool.

Adam and the icicles.

(Source: Flickr / helenepertl)

Edit: Here is a photo Pierce took of me taking the second photo.

The weather was very cold last week. The east wind brought snow and I gave up on spring, got sick and spent the long weekend mostly inside the house with feelings of self-pity and nostalgia over Easters past baking ham inside bread and fighting egg wars. Pierce dug out his Easter chocolate kit and we gathered bits of chocolate from around the house and melted them into an egg and a duck. Putting the halves together was tricky. The duck glued ok, but the egg did not fare very well. We took the duck to the most sheltered beach in Dublin and ate his head that day.

Our house, although small, has high ceilings. There is no attic, only the roof between us and the sky. We spent some time before Christmas keeping our eyes open for a tree that might fit. Tall with a narrow girth. The trees we found were small and squat or high and wide and were not right. We carried a measuring tape for a month.

I love my parents for keeping our christmas trees, going back around ten years, in the garden. It is not a big garden. The trees are remarked upon by visitors in the summer. For years a lonely wooden woman-skiier hung with only one ski on the uppermost branch of the tallest tree. I could see her from my bedroom window. The branches are used for firewood and the trunks age in the open, called upon occasionally as washing-line supports.

When Pierce and I could not find a tree I disentangled the above pictured from the other trunks, like aging elephants, each one year more brittle, one year smoother. This tree feels like a bone and we have kept it to hold up our lamp.

A present made from 0.8mm crimson pentland goat for a long and happy marriage.