Seven Years of Leipzig Today

The view from my current living room in winter - here is my life right now
The home in Texas, where my life still somehow continues over there....
My permanent resting place someday just a few feet away from this obelisk where I will take my place next to my mother, just as we are standing here together, to join her to await the resurrection.

This is a short post: today I have been in Leipzig for seven years. And when I got off the plane on that snowy day back then, I knew no one in this city, and I never would have imagined all the things that would happen in the next five years: church crises, new jobs, moving, and the sudden illness and death of my mother.

Now I look back and have many friends in Leipzig and Germany. I feel very much at home here, despite the frigid weather. And I look with concern at my life in Texas. Seven years of continuous life in Leipzig, and no one from the states has visited me; no one from Texas - except my mother and brother - has even called me on the telephone one single time. I can count on one hand the number of people from the USA who keep any kind of regular email contact with me. My mother was my real connection to my life in Texas, and now she is gone. I've tried this blog, and then facebook, but I have slowly come to realize that nothing will change the saying "out of sight, out of mind", so for everybody over there I am "out of sight and out of mind".

I don't know how much longer I will stay here. Yet I wonder what I have to return to in the USA. Most of my family I now visit at the cemetary, and as the years without ongoing communication go by, you grow apart from people you used to know so well.

While I am thankful for these seven years, Life is very different now than it was then. Some of it changed because of my decisions, but much change was thrown upon me. Yet as the years go by, I realize more and more that our life is woven out of the connections to the people we get to know and even love. I am happy for this woven garment here in Europe, but sad to see the garment being neglected in the USA.