Where I Lived
In April when I got to go to Germany, I had the opportunity to return to my old neighborhood in Berlin and poke around for a little while. So much has changed, yet so much is still the same. The apartment buildings are still all in the same places, just with new paint. The baseball/softball diamond is still there, still with the little hill we would go sledding on. The ecumenical church mom dragged me to is still there. My old 1st grade school is still there--even still called the same thing. Part of the huge field we had to cross to get to and from school is still there.
But the buildings are no longer the army base. They are regular apartments, leased to regular families. Some American, some German, some from elsewhere. The playgrounds have changed or been completely removed. Part of the huge field is still there, but the other part is now a youth center and new apartment buildings (though part of me wants to say that the youth center was there when I was). I don't know: Can you go home again?
Here are some of the pictures I took:
This is the "huge forest" behind our apartment building. We lived in the green/tan one at the back of the picture...it wasn't painted all pretty back then.
Moving closer to the building. My bedroom (I'm pretty sure) is either the green window immediately to the left of the door or the first tan window next to it. If you went in from the back, our apartment was the first one on the left hand side. The Allenders lived across the hall and the Irish family (kids were Susie and Patrick...don't remember their last names) lived upstairs. I saw The Wizard of Oz
That parking lot is where I learned to ride a bike...that and along Stewardstrasse. She was a blue girl's bike with a white banana seat, and her name was Rosie Lee. At various times she had streamers, a white basket with flowers on the front, and those silly clackers that went between the spokes. Sometimes she had all at once. All of us kids would race our bikes around the building...I alwasy won with Rosie Lee, even when Gregory Hall had his 10-speed.
I don't think the painting on the front is designed to match the back. Again, our windows would be the ones to the right of the door, I think all three of them before the brown pole down the middle. The first one was kitchen, second was dining room, third living room. The Halls (Gregory, Daniel, and Nicole) and "boy Aaron" (as opposed to "girl Erin") lived on the right side of the building...don't remember anyone else on that side.
This scene was the big shock to me. See that big open spot between the tree on the left side of the picture and the one in the middle? There's 'sposed to be a big, red, wavy, 3-story slide there. The one in this picture, in fact. This picture is interesting for it's story, as well. The girls are, from left to right, my best friend Isabel, (Irish) Susie, "girl Erin," and Nicole Hall. The bushes on the right made a wonderful hideout...there were trails and clearings inside so we kids could play more or less unsupervised. "Girl Erin" lived with her father in the apartment building in the background; that's pretty much the paint job on all of the buildings at the time.
That slide has other fun memories for me. When we lived across Stewardstrasse in the Argentinische Allee apartment (farthest from where I'm standing, lower level, maybe have a vague memory of the balconies), Flip (who lived across the forest area) and I would make raiding expeditions to play in the cool playground. We had a sandbox and a swingset in our forest, but the Stewardstrasse building had a huge slide and another playground on the side of the building. We loved tormenting the resident kids with our presence--they occasionally were around to drive us out. Little did I know I'd actually get to be one of the "owners" of the slide one day.
Ah, memories.