April

Yesterday, Easter Monday (which is, like Good Friday, a holiday here), while the rest of the household was napping, or trying to nap, I went to see the cherry blossoms near the upper end of the Mauerpark. The flowers, almost at their peak, were a little hard to appreciate in the glowering, just-above-freezing weather, which turned to hail as I stood there, and passed through stages of snow and gusting rain as I walked back, holding a plastic shopping bag over me for cover. Bright sun emerged from between clouds just after I returned home.

I never thought “cruelest month” made much sense applied to April, but this month I kind of get it - one feels life struggling to return, against more than usual opposition. Meanwhile, a new lockdown, starting Thursday, applies even to Kita (where only “emergency care” will be offered, a standard many try to game). 

Easter Sunday was an island of sun, though unseasonably cold, and windy in that city-of-the-plains way that Berlin shares with places like Chicago. We spent it doing two Easter-egg hunts, one in our building’s courtyard with our American neighbors, whose vaccinated grandmother had just arrived from the US, one of the few to make it in (an academic, she could only enter because she has a research partner here). 

The other egg hunt, with two families from Kita, was also a goodbye party for one of them, who are moving on short notice after finding a house in southern Germany near the Dad’s work (which he had up until now been doing remotely). A particularly sweet and appealing family whom I knew from short chats in the cloakroom, their leaving made me regret not having gotten to know them better. On Sunday, the younger of their two girls, close to J.’s age, leaned her head against him briefly but touchingly as they sat in a little wooden play house. 

Though our leaving is still months away, this period feels tinged with melancholy, heightened that afternoon because everyone there was also in the midst of moving or planning a move. In each case - whether to southern Germany, the US, or just a faraway part of Berlin, where one of the families is building a house - the move meant leaving our acutely walkable, sociable, effortless existence for something greener but more car-bound, poorer in playgrounds, coffee shops, and, at first anyway, friends. The family moving south said they’d found an amazing playground near their new home, but no one went there - they all had backyards. A mixed blessing.

It felt like one of those poignant parties for someone leaving New York, except a version of New York where every obstacle to sane and affordable parenthood had been swept away. It felt a bit like we were giving up on an idyll.