Breathe

I can always breathe in Arosa. After the car ride during which The Boychen refused to sleep even though we purposely left at his nap-time, after the last 40 minutes when Small Boy’s admirable patience finally deserted him and he began asking “How much longer?” every five minutes and then arguing with us over the reply, after the mad dash to the sport store for helmets and sleds five minutes before closing, after the unpacking, I can breathe. A person can breathe up there, can breathe in big lungfuls of snow and sky, can breathe in this:

Yes, a person can breathe up there.

This, again

Every year I forget what autumn in this part of Switzerland is like. This part of Switzerland, where we can see the mountains but are not in them. This part of Switzerland lying at 500 meters above sea-level, this moist and temperate section of Switzerland. Every year I forget this, forget about the low-lying fog, the weak sunlight failing to break through, the damp air. The rain and the grey. The way the chill sinks into everything but temperatures do not fall enough for snow. Bare trees, sodden limp brown grass. Now that we’re on the farm our driveway is a ribbon of mud: there is not enough sun to dry it, not enough chill to at least freeze it hard. Every year I forget this, forget that from now until spring, sunshine will not come to us. 

From now until spring we will be chasing the sun, gaining elevation, getting above the clouds. When we can. Work, Kindergarten – these things keep up in the flatlands. Hockey practice bang at noon steals our Saturdays. I look out the window of my studio – the studio with walls the color of Idaho skies, and now I remember why my heart chose this color – and cannot see our nearest neighbors half a kilometer away. Every year I forget this, this grey blanket. I can remember the exact color of light shimmering across Swiftcurrent Lake the summer I was nine, but from one year to the next I forget the color of this fog.

* * *

Honestly compels me to confess that the mornings are worse than the afternoons, that often, by mid-day, even the Bernese Mittleland shrugs its shoulders and shakes off the mantle of fog.

Noticing

Many of Bern’s charms are obvious: the fountain statues, the clock tower,

the long sweep of the Old Town.

But there’s always something else, too, something waiting quietly to be noticed. The cool, narrow Gasschens,

the shop displays,

the tram lines criss-crossing the city.

Everywhere I turn there is something to notice, on those days I remember to notice. It’s like this everywhere; one doesn’t have to live in a five hundred year old city to stop and stare (though I imagine it helps). One just has to stop.

Being here

I am fairly sure that even after all these years, I do not take living here for granted. On every clear day I still stop and stare at the Alps
as though I’d just arrived yesterday.

But sometimes I’m reminded that maybe, maybe I do. Just a bit. Maybe I have stopped seeing this city I am privileged to call home. I recently posted a picture to my on-line writing group and got virtual gasps in reply. It’s not every day you see statues like this.


Except, for me, it is every day. These Bernese statues on these Bernese streets. I must walk past them four days out of seven. And I know they’re stunning – I continue to take pictures of them, after all – but I forget, I guess, how otherly they are, how utterly special. Sometimes, it takes another person’s intake of breath to remind me to sigh. It takes another person’s eyes going wide to remind me to close my own in gratitude. That happened to me last week, so I’m going to take some time to look closely at the streets of my city. Because my home, it makes people stop and stare. I should be one of those people.

Moments

I’ve been coming to Arosa for over a decade now, and rarely have I seen so much snow. The curve between the road and the Obersee (upper lake) where there is often a snow sculpture was covered by a child’s mountain of plowed-away snow.

Small Boy climbed it again and again, each time barreling back down hill on his sit-sled. I’ve seen hints of it before, but this trip confirmed it: the boy is a speed demon, fearless on sled or Bob or, it would appear, skis.

* * *

A man stands on a hotel roof shovelling great mounds of snow down onto the sidewalk below; it lands with a muffled thud that recalls the sound of avalanche cannons going off in the distance. Snow sprays in every direction when the larger blocks crash into the sidewalk. In all my years of coming to Arosa, I have never seen this.

* * *

Our first days are grey, clouded over. The mountains come and go like ghost ships.

* * *

I drink deep draughts of mountain air. My cheeks tingle. It is good to be here.

A taste of Arosa

I keep forgetting that vacation with two small boys is more properly termed a “change of scenery” or a “break in the routine” than a “restful vacation.” I am exhausted from trying to keep up with those two. I mean, with this

this

and this

going on, who could rest?

More words and pictures soon.

Commuting

It snowed on New Year’s Eve and part of New Year’s day and then the temperatures promptly dropped below freezing and stayed there; they’ll be staying there all week. The sidewalks are sheets of ice and bumpy rutted packed snow; the elderly and the stroller crowd are not amused. The state of the sidewalks is such that today I decided it was easier to pick Small Boy up from Spielgruppe in the sled than with the stroller. I packed the Boychen up and belted him into the seat we’ve got attached to our Davos sled and pulled him along behind me to get Small Boy. On the way home, Small Boy sat on the sled behind his brother and I dragged them both home earning smiles from the other pedestrians, more than one of whom probaby wished somebody would drag them along on a sled. The privileges of childhood.

An ordinary day

I love these fairy-tale Swiss days, story book days with the mountains and the snow and the crackling blue sky so clear it hurts. Days when we go sledding and I realize that I’m sledding in the Swiss Alps. The Swiss Alps. And even after eight years, the wonder of it hits me all over again and I’m reminded of these lines from Jhumpa Lahiri:

“I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

Simply beyond my imagination.

This first day

They’re letting me stay

I don’t often blog specifically about being an expat; I’m not sure why. There are a few reasons, I guess. I moved to Switzerland in December of 2000 – the classic “fish out of water” “American puts foot in mouth” stories happened years ago (and oh, how they did happen). I’m not currently in a language class so I don’t have weekly reminders of maddening German gramatics. And, frankly, my German is pretty good and I finally, after years in the wilderness, understand Swiss-German* so there aren’t even a lot of “lost in translation” stories.

I am not blind to the joys of Swiss life and the beautiful things that surround me. I still stop in my tracks when I walk to the Old Town by way of the train station, something I do almost every day, and stare at the panorama of the Bernese Alps spread out before me. I still think, often, I can’t believe I get to live here. But my days are just days like everybody else’s: filled with taking care of the kids and the house and doing the laundry and writing a poem. It’s life. It’s my life and I don’t spend a lot of time feeling like an expat. I don’t spend a lot of time feeling like an Ausländerin. I am. I am a foreigner technically, legally, but this is my home. I feel at home here; I am at home here. There aren’t so many expat stories, anymore, when one wakes up in the place one belongs.

Ah, but yesterday I needed to renew my C-Pass, my permanent residency permit. Ah, I thought. An expat story. A Swiss Bureaucracy story. Except it wasn’t, really. It was thoroughly un-blog-worthy. I went, I took my number, I handed over my documents, I got a new C-Pass. The whole thing took just under an hour  – and would have taken less time than that but for my forgetting** to bring a picture and having to run back home to get one – and I left with a C-Pass valid until 2013. And not much of a story. But when you’re dealing with the bureaucracy that lets you stay or makes you go, I guess not much of a story is a good thing.

So there it is, my non-story story. I’m staying. Which was totally never in doubt anyway.

* insert standard caveat “as spoken by Bernese Swiss over 16 and under 60″ here.

** By “forgetting” I mean they failed to indicate anywhere on my official form that a new picture would be required this time around.