We’re finishing up our vacation in southern Germany, having done one long walk and three decent hikes in the last four days. I do not expect to be able to move my lower body without pain before Sunday.
It is an odd place to vacation, because even though there is so much to do – think of an outdoor activity and they’ve got it here – it seems like that wasn’t enough for the locals and the visitors. Like the town council got together and said “Is there some way we can promote tourism and support our funeral directors at the same time?”
So, on our first full day, we saw parachutes floating over our building (view from our balcony attached). The base jumping site is essentially right above where we live. Emma and Noah immediately latched onto this as THE thing we were going to do while we we were here and persisted in their campaign until I explained that the only way I was going to willingly jump off a mountain would be if I was cornered by a pack of wolves. But the exciting death options had only begun. We took a cable car to the top of our mountain and saw that they were renting out go-carts that one could ride to the bottom, which seemed like quick way to separate the wheat from the chaff. And we thought that was that, until we went up the next mountain and discovered THEY rent out two-wheeled scooters – admittedly with motorbike-style wheels – that you can ride down the mountain.
We skipped all that and decided to make do with hiking, where the main risk of dying was from overexposure to preteens complaining about how they were going to die by hiking.
But, of course, that wasn’t the truly strange part of the trip. Back in October, we took our trip to Leipzig and Dresden, where we were just trying to see if we could still vacation as a family. This was our first vacation as a family of four: Not an attempt to do it, but a straight-up acceptance that this is what we are now.
You travel to a place like this and there are tons of other families. Every cable car lift has a restaurant with a playground at either end. Every hike means coming across other families with kids. That forces the concrete questions. Other families were doing this with 6-year-olds. Are there realities with a healthier Colin that we could have tried the same? Christina said she anticipated it would have been a lot of him screaming “No” at all the walking, punctuated by brief moments of excitement every time we didn’t get run over by a go-cart. Maybe.
I’m still at the phase where every time I see a kid who would have been about his age – or even a bit younger – and feel like it’s a punch in the gut. I don’t think I’m so far gone that I would wish death on any of these other kids. But there is a background background chatter in my head asking who these parents paid off so that they didn’t have to watch their kid die of cancer. There’s a lot of thinking that Colin would have behaved better than the brat at the playground. There’s a lot of trying to realize that the life we had the last three years or so wasn’t normal and that this – where people can take small hikes with a kindergartener – is what should be normal. It’s a lot to take in at times.
I wonder how long it will be until seeing a young boy doesn’t feel like a defeat. I’ll have to get used to it. The little boys across the street are twins and just three weeks younger than Colin. My home office window looks right on their front yard, and I spend a lot of time watching them play. A few weeks ago, while I was trying to work, I got distracted instead because the blonder of the boys decided this was a good time to stand in his driveway and sing “La la la la” on repeat for about five straight solid minutes. It’s adorable, I have to admit. It’s also like having my guts ripped out.
I’m not going to be able to opt out of a world with little boys in it. I think this vacation is just making me realize how much work I’ll need to do to get used to it.