on collecting things and changes in town

dear blog!
for the time i will stick to english, quite some of your potential readers don´t know german. not that i expect anybody to read my blog. only for just in case.

today a friend of my father came to pick up a couple things. my father was not only good in collecting paper (sorting is another story!) but also in collecting things. the flat of my mother is filled up with that stuff. either we throw it all away or we try to sell or give all that stuff away. we first gonna try the latter. we still can throw whats left over. this friend of my father is not exactly on the same side as me. politically. rather the opposite. in germany it is not easy to be politically further away from each other than my father´s friend and me. they studied together at the highschool of the german army. later they both worked for the army, my father administrative stuff, as i mentioned before, the job of my fathers friend was that top secret "that secret, that even his boss didn´t know what he was working on". when i said that i was voting the left party (die linke) first there was silence in the room, then the subject was finished. i didn´t dare to mention that i was on their list during the last local elections in belzig. luckily i only got 17 votes. but i have to say that i like the guy, despite our political differences, he is member of the christian democrat party, pretty straight forward, has a great sense of humour and he is one of those sources about my father´s life, always ready to tell one or the other story. he left with a historical atlas (in leather bound), a wooden chest, a wooden garden bench still wrapped in cardboard, a flower pot you can hang on the wall and two boxes of our old paper. he forgot sticks to grow tomatoes and photos from their time together in the army. what makes things a little complicated for my mother and me is that i do have a driving lisence, but i am the worst car driver you can imagine (which is actually a lie. you can´t imagine). and we just gave my fathers car to the recycling centre. there was anyway a problem with the oil and it was already 17 years old. people who are picking things up are always welcome in the next couple of weeks in the flat of my mother and if it is only some old paper.

almost every day i go shopping for my mother and me. my mothers flat is on a hill, the next shop is about a ten minutes walk away from the flat and my mother is not the best in walking anymore. she has got this rollator sort of thing which helps her keeping balance and where she can put things on as well. in a flat environment without stairs she is able to make quite a distance with the thing by herself. but already two meters after leaving the flat there are stairs. already there no chance for mom and rollator. then more stairs. the hill. to town a walk of about 40 minutes. these are some reason why one of my jobs is at the moment shopping. in the beginning i took the bus. after fixing the bike my father got last year from his brother (he needed the space for another motorcycle), i am now a happy biciclist. compared to when i went to school a lot has changed here in böblingen. i realised the changes already during my short visits for christmas and birthdays during the last couple of years, i used to say that every time i come here, there is something new, a new highway, new places in town, a new shopping centre, a new park and whatever. but now it all falls into place. i am especially happy about the new bike paths. i only have to go a couple of meters on ordinary roads and cross a couple of streets to get to the centre, i can even go to the centre of the neighbour town sindelfingen. only on bike paths. starting at my mothers flat. next time more on daily life.

have good dreams,
burkie in böblingen