By Norma Sultz |
Lonely would be too inadequate a word for how my husband and I felt during the 1967 Christmas season far from our home in Kansas. When the Army drafted Don we had been married almost a year. We were thrilled when I could join him in the quaint southern town of Goeppingen, West Germany.
However with no phone, no television, no laundry facility nearby, and letters that took two weeks for delivery, we were often confused learning the basics of survival in a foreign culture. Occasionally a reel-to-reel audio tape recording from our extended family arrived in the mail. That wasn’t as positive as hoped, with garbled conversations of several talking at once. Life felt comparable to a time warp in the Twilight Zone.
Our off-base apartment was heated with a coal stove, had no hot running water, and our landlord and neighbors did not speak English. We did have a hot plate that we could barely afford to turn on, and a shared unheated bathroom down the hall with air freshener that actually froze. Exasperated and overwhelmed trying to adjust, I tried taking a German class on base, but most of our village spoke the Schwabisch dialect, and our American instructor seemed to be intent on teaching the proper book version of one of the other 50+ dialects spoken throughout Germany.
Despite these facts, we anticipated a festive Christmas with friends from the Army base, learned a few German traditions, and enjoyed tasting scrumptious new desserts. Gorgeous snow-covered mountains gave us a much-needed lift in our spirits.
A few weeks before Christmas we trudged a few blocks through the snow to the village Christmas tree farm, joyously bartered what little money we had, and cut down an apartment-size gem. We balanced the tree end to end between us and lumbered back to our sparsely furnished apartment. We laughed, exuberant and delighted with our newfound project. We opted to put colored light bulb strings on our fragrant tree to remind us of familiar traditions, strung popcorn, dried apples, and anything else that cost next to nothing.
Long after Christmas we left the tree up, feeling that it somehow connected us to home. When we finally decided to part with that dried, scraggly, Charlie-Brown-looking piece of nostalgia it was losing needles by the handful, but we couldn’t decide how to dispose of it. It wouldn’t fit in our Volkswagen Beetle to take it to the dump, and we couldn’t understand our German landlord’s instructions. So one afternoon we started feeding it to the fired-up coal stove in our living room.
As we crammed branches of the brittle tree into the open coal-stove door, unexpected rapid-fire popping began. Sparks flew and bursts of heat snapped out toward us into the room. Explosive sounds began as we panicked and simultaneously screamed, “What do we do? What do we do?”
Burning embers boomeranged out of the stove as we scrambled to dodge them. We looked up to see wallpaper peeling and curling behind the glowing, red-hot stovepipe and saw small pieces of the stove lining break loose. We both jumped backward to escape the sizzling embers. My husband turned and ran toward the balcony door and yanked it open to get ventilation into the room. Frigid wind blew over the balcony snow which helped cool the overly-heated room.
We fervently hoped that our landlord would not kick us out because of this fiasco, and we were thankful nothing else in the room caught fire. How could we explain inexperience or ignorance in his language? It would have translated stupidity in any dialect.