it’s been nearly seven years since i first moved out from home. off to sweden i went and after a short break in between onwards to finland. i just looked up what i wrote about leaving the place i called home for 20 years, it was more a question than an answer: would you trade your memories for freedom? mom asked me if i wanted to move back to the yellow house together with atsrid. she would take an apartment on her own as she feels the house is too big for her. and it all came back. the memories, the stories. my great-grandfather had bought and re-built it over 100 years ago. my family was by no means rich by then, but we owned some big pieces of land. he gambled most of it away. so when his father died my grandfather took over, the first one in our family to graduate from high school. he was so talented and working towards a career in academics when the war came. high school would be the last school he went to because when he returned from four years as a prisoner of war in russia there was a family to take care of. but there was also the big yellow house, which miraculously had survived the war and the bombs. as austria rose from the rubble, so did the house which gained a floor to accomodate an even bigger family: mom, her sister and her brother – my aunt and my uncle. including great-grandmother and another relative there was seven of them. and even if times were sometimes hard, my mom had a happy childhood. years later there was grandfather, mom and i. my aunt and uncle left for vienna to become a doctor and a diplomat respectively. the first memories i have of this planet are all about the yellow house, about grandfather, our garden and the summer days when we would take the bike and ride it only a couple of hundred meters down to the horse racetrack. i would get my ice cream and call it quite a day. i would walk to school and walk home because there was always someone around the big yellow house and it felt like the best place in the world – home. i could bring whomever i wanted because i was trusted. and even if grandfather was strict sometimes (oh yes, there were fights!) i probably had the happiest childhood i could imagine – being the spoiled single child i was. and now a circle closes. i am back in klagenfurt, sitting in apartment i like. i like it but its white walls bare no memories, the could barely tell you any stories. the walls back in the big yellow house could, for hours or even days. i do understand astrid. i do understand what her motives are for not wanting to move back there. but things are not always easy, because what for her is just some house, some pile of bricks in probably not the greatest neighborhood to me is home and always will be. and i could never imagine anybody else than myself, my children or grandchildren to make up for the stories its walls will go on to tell for the years to come.
i believe.