With two bags, two suitcases of clothes to be precise.
They were overweight. Re-arranged at the airport.
The lucky making it across the sea with me.
Years of clothes, clothes that held memories I didn’t want to let go.
Why so many clothes? You may ask.
Have you been to those retail shops?
A blouse costs 30 euros, 30 euros!
Clothes are expensive.
The last thing I want is my money running out on shopping sprees.
But they were primarily summer clothes.
Yes, two bags full of clothes for the summer.
To dwell in a country of four seasons.
A country where the winters are coldie coldie coldie as my son describes coldness.
What was I thinking?
Was I prepared for this new life? Or refusing to face it truthfully?
I didn’t even have a winter jacket. My confidence drowned in the summer semester, typed boldly on my admission letter.
“Why is it so cold?” I asked the administrator at the international students’ office when I arrived to register as a student.
“I thought it is summer” I added.
If she did answer my strange and stupid question, I don’t remember what she said.
Here I was, expecting an April to be summer.
Yes, the same German April that does what it likes to be sunny and warm.
Don’t marvel, but that was the superpower I had.
Things turning around my way and being just as I wanted, even the weather.
Funny, isn’t it?
When I look back, I wonder, what was I thinking?
Why didn’t I check the weather?
Why didn’t I ask what to bring along?
I’d been to Germany before. Even that June, Summer had been coldie.
Was my self-inflicted decision to return home only when I had finished my two years of studies what I was running away from?
Maybe that was why I had packed two suitcases of tee-shirts, blouses, dresses, loafers and sandals for 2 years of summer, winter, autumn, and spring hoping, just hoping that they may all be summer for me.
God bless you