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Lydia kann netler5/4/2023 Maybe it’s that the physicalness of squeezing Nora’s arm, kissing her cheek, threading her long dirty blond hair behind her ear, gives me joy. Why am I so happy, I ask myself? It isn’t reducible. I am happy to be with them, happier than I can ever imagine being on Zoom. We come closer to each other, and I run towards the group jumping up and down like a nutcase, kissing and hugging and laughing. I begin to skip towards them, waving my arms and making silly faces at the younger child, Arthur, in the stroller. Nora, my niece, a favorite because she is the most like me in this family, she is walking towards me as I stand up from my vantage point at a Starbucks in the station, and I find myself bubbling with energy. I meet up with my niece and her two kids and her mom, my sister-in-law, as they descend a train in Leipzig, Germany. Pleasure in the first greeting after now years of not actually seeing someone in the flesh. Visiting family is the first, significant for the feeling of pleasure. All those decisions and plans and meals and visits to museums and walled cities and monuments and beaches and hikes and swims and and and… What is noteworthy? Symbolic and meaningful.īut what I want to focus on here is what remains after six weeks of planes, trains, metros, and automobiles. I was recreating a historic trek over the Pyrénées Mountains from France to Spain to escape the Nazis during WWII, the walk taken by several of my family members, all deceased except for the son, eight years old at the time of the hike but now eighty-eight. The situation: a post covid isolation return to visit family, improve French skills, and perform a Mitzvah - a Hebrew term for doing a good deed. A distillation down, down, and further down to the essential, in this case the takeaway from a recent five-week journey to Europe ending with one week in New England.
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