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 end...