The house by the lake
Stephanie has been thinking a lot about aging lately. Right now, she's mainly wondering where she will live once the kids and all their stuff are out of the house and she can do whatever she wants.
By Stephanie Hielscher
I had an interview with Sue, and I was inspired to some thoughts I've been chasing lately.
And this is how it happened: In the end, she told me all the things she plans to do once she only has responsibility for herself and no longer for her children. For example, that she can imagine living somewhere completely different again or even not having a fixed residence anymore. I've never thought about it like that before. It's a bit like after finishing high school when you move out of your parents' house. Only now it's the others moving out, and you yourself are no longer needed as a daily home. Freedom, man!
That's why I'm now making a list of places of my dreams where I would optionally like to live. In my dreams, for this moment, there are no wars, inflations, old-age poverty, pandemics, age-related diseases, or whatever else terrible one can imagine. I am just imagining that my husband and I have a fixed base to which we and our child and our dog can always return. A meeting point, a home that is big enough for all of us and all who hopefully will still join. Hello daughter-in-law, hello thousand grandchildren, hello sweet dog babies.
My husband and I then become nomads and move on whenever it suits us. I guess after two months. First stop: Bad Gastein. With a view of the mountains, we drink coffee on the balcony in the morning and then take a long walk. We take the squirrel trail and pack some peanuts beforehand, which we crack open on the way and feed to the curious squirrels. We enter the salt mine to let the radium exert its health-beneficial effect on our bodies. After eight weeks, we continue to Istanbul. There we live right in the city in a house with a café on the ground floor where we have our first coffee. It's a bit noisy. I am sensitive to noise. But I still want to sit there because I want to be in the middle of life. After coffee, we go to a museum and in the evening to a concert. We never eat in the apartment, but always in a square right in the middle, among many people. I find a yoga studio and do my asanas every day. In Istanbul, we are done after six weeks and make a short stop at home to see our son and give him a hand-carved chess set that we bought for him in Istanbul and a jacket that we bought for him in Bad Gastein, and hug him very tightly and for a long time. Then we go to the cinema because we missed the cinema. And to the Volksbühne because we missed the Volksbühne. And then we realize that we have done so many things we missed that suddenly we have been in Berlin for three months. That's probably how it goes on. After we have been to Mallorca and California, we come back home because then it's Christmas, which we of course want to celebrate together here. And when it starts again to Paris and Sicily, our son comes to visit us in Palermo and we buy him as many scoops of ice cream as he can eat. It could also be that there is a family battle: Who can eat the most scoops?
It's completely different from the house by the lake in Peter Fox's song. And it turns out differently anyway, but I look forward to what is to come. I look forward to the time in twenty years just as much as the time in two years. I think that's mainly because in this little dream there are no conflicts or even separations, and in my imagination, I can do everything with my family. That the three of us then are the unit that we are now. And then I also like to sing the song by Bosse called Frankfurt/Oder, in which it says: I never cared where we were.
Stephanie Hielscher studied cultural studies with a focus on documentary film at HU Berlin. Afterwards, she completed her traineeship at MTV. She works as a freelance journalist for various broadcasters such as KiKa, Nickelodeon, MTV, Sat1/Pro7, and RBB. Her focus is on documentaries and children's television. Since 2020, she has also been hosting and producing the podcast Fünf zu Eins for Mit Vergnügen and writes the weekly newsletter Eins zu Eins. You can learn more about Stephanie on her Instagram account @stephaniehielscher.