It’s sunny about every day now, and the winter gloom and fog and rain are almost out of our memories. It’s not the only thing that we’ve lost lately; as the spring wiped the winter clouds from the sky, the virus cleared our schedule, and now it has been three months since we have been in another country except tiny Luxembourg. And even throughout those months we’ve only made a few trips around the country itself, and since Luxembourg is under 1,000 square miles, it’s pretty easy to figure out our range.
We’ve almost forgotten the different parts of the country and the other places on this continent. We’ve stayed close to home. We’ve played in our tiny backyard, we’ve gone on hikes, and when the playgrounds opened two weeks ago (finally!) that was our new big adventure: being able to swing again. We are just now starting to talk about taking some trips, going to some other countries, starting again to see some of the things that we came here to see. These surrounding five miles have become pretty familiar, and we’ve been realizing how quickly our worlds can close up, and sometimes how long it takes to open them back up again.
These last few sunny weeks when and odd day comes and the skies cloud over, the rain comes and clears within an hour. It doesn’t linger for hours, days, and weeks like it did in the winter months. It’s hard to think that far back now, it’s hard to really remember not being able to leave the house without rain jackets, not being able to come back into the house without dripping and shivering. It’s hard to remember being able to rent a car without a care in the world and what it felt like to not have to scramble to get a mask on Eliot’s face every time the bus pulls up. But in the brief hours when the sky clouds over I’ve been trying to realize what we have lived in these last six months.
Now, when we pull the shades down to slow the slow heat growth in the apartment that builds throughout the day, I’m remembering the days when we had to turn up the radiators and make sure there was a blanket in every room.
And back then, back in a time when the skies clouded over constantly and when we could travel wherever we wanted, we rented a car and visited what has been one of my most favorite parts of the country so far, Vianden Castle.
Vianden Castle and the town it gets its name from (or is it the other way around?) is set up north in the Luxembourg mountains, and when I say “Luxembourg mountains” I mean, mostly medium sized hills. But there is one big one, the biggest mountain of them all, which actually borders on a sheer cliff on one side, and this is where Vianden stands. It towers over the medieval town. It can be seen from every direction. The town lies down below along the riverbank, set up against narrow cobblestone streets that makes seeing a modern person talking on a cell phones seem like wizardry, and makes the too fast cars seem like they come from another world.
From up on top of the castle walls it was hard to get a full view of the hills because whenever we looked up our faces met a constant drizzle, but when we did get a view down the mists moved soft and grey through the dark green wood on the surrounding hills. The stone city peaked in and out from between the raindrops.
I’m not well versed in Western European literature, so maybe feelings that I associated with this site were transported from a very different place, but when I saw the ways the fog moved, and the way the stone towers of the castle lifted up above us, it reminded me of the dark, deep woods that they talk about in Dracula. The things they noticed in that book were the same; the mists, the tall green hills, the way the villages crowd around the valleys. The way the castle towers seemed higher than the sky. The churches on the city streets that were built in the 1500s and 1600s, and the falling down city walls on the outskirts.
If everything had been clear skies and normal, if we had gone there in the bright sunlight, I think we would have missed the mystery, the feeling of the past that braided with the fog around the valley. It’s a lot easier to imagine vampires sliding through the dark green wood when the mists twist around the trees. It’s a lot easier to squint and see the old Luxembourg counts who once walked these walls and ate in these rooms with their stern faces and high collars. It’s easy to see them riding through the gates from the valley down below.
When we squinted extra hard, when the fog rolled in heavy and we only saw bits and pieces of the stone walls, we could almost see back all the way to when the Romans first started construction on this site for their the simple, basic fort 1000 years ago that slowly grew into the castle that it is today. I don’t think we would have seen it in the sunlight, but there, on that rainy day, the smells of old feasts and the lights of the open air fires in the castle kitchens wafted and flickered up into the clouds.
I’m bringing this memory back because even now as I write this, birds chirp from every tree, and the sunshine reflects off the white roses. I’m bringing this back up because I needed, after three months of being in the same place, I needed to remember something different, something grand and solid and so integrally tied to the past that we can breathe the same air, stand in the same places, and feel the same rain drops.
Sometimes it takes a few shadows and a few foggy days. Sometimes it takes a beautiful, dim photo of one of my favorites parts of Luxembourg to bring back a past where castles were inhabited and where we could travel to see them, a past where driving over to another country was something we could still remember.
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