A true childhood tale: The girl, the empty house, and the nasturtiums

...not my nasturtiums

Ober-Eschbach, Germany, 1971: It was a sunny Saturday morning, but I dragged my feet walking home from school (a quaint German tradition — school on the weekend), because I knew that I was walking towards an empty house. A house gaping with rooms with no one in them to greet me.

Quite unusually, my parents were off on a shopping expedition in Frankfurt (the big city) and wouldn’t return until early afternoon. My siblings were at friends’. I was on my own. Alone. In the house. And I was fearful of entering it. My 11-year-old imagination was fertile with goblins and monsters and generally bad people coming from the shadows of the laundry room to get me.

My mother, knowing of my trepidation at being home alone, was clever: She had planned ahead with me. We had decided that I would enter the house through the basement door at the back of the house and would go directly to the play room at the end of the hallway. There, Mum would have left me a snack. All I had to endure was a few hours alone in that room, with the TV for company.

I arrived home from school and went to the backyard. I steeled myself to walk down the concrete steps, surrounded by incongruously cheerful nasturtiums, and into the house through the basement door closing it tight behind me. There. If a monster came in that way, it would have to open the door and I would at least be warned by the noise.

I can remember the conflicting feelings of fear at the untold number of awful things that might happen to me alone that house, and the knowledge that there was simply no avoiding being alone in that room in the house. I simply had to let time pass.

I stayed in that room, sitting on the bed with my back against the wall, eating the snack and watching TV, until Mum and Dad returned. And everything was safe again.

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Of course, I survived that experience. These days, I don't mind being alone in the house, though I still, sometimes, think monsters and baddies might rise up out of the darkest corner to get me. Mostly, I keep those thoughts at bay and just appreciate my own company. 

What triggered this memory from so many decades ago was my own nasturtium plants that are bearing the most delicate of very early buds. They are the first nasturtiums I have planted, and I do not know why I have waited so long. My mother's nasturtiums tumbling down the basement stair railings, softening the harshness of the concrete steps is a vivid snapshot in my from-long-ago memory archive. On my plants, the leaves are prolific and lovely, though the buds are few so far. I am hoping the squirrels stay away so I get to enjoy the colour and delicate beauty of these blooms... 

...my nasturtiums, close up to see the buds. I hope the plants will trail over the raised bed
in which their clay pot is placed. Fingers crossed...

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Top photo of nasturtiums blooming beautifully by Nancy Hann on Unsplash