Waxing lyrical

This time Ludgera came over to my place, and I discovered three things about her that proved she's not only my art buddy par excellence, but also a friend I am in sync with. Like me, she loves to try new things, new techniques, new ways of making art, new art forms; she has a healthy curiosity. Unlike me, she goes out and gets the new tool/book/course/whatever, and that is very good for me! We share a love for really good coffee and buy our own beans. And besides she has a July birthday, which is the month the rest of my family seems to have birthdays in! There's more, but I don't want to embarrass her.

Which reminds me of a coffee story. Back in Ireland, when I was newly widowed, a fellow university student, a feisty middle-aged woman as Irish as the hills, swept in, packed me up, and took me to live in her large airy house in Ballsbridge. The family was large, so I was surrounded by people. An enormous rose garden in the back was her husband's pride and joy. He was German, and the two cultures meshed nicely. We had an Irish lunch, and a German abendbrot, which was basically deli items from McGill's in Dublin and different breads. And when it came to coffee, she would always ask: "Do you want echt, or instant?" (echt means real). I understood all of this because I had spent a year in Germany in my peripatetic youth when I went around learning languages.

Dublin was like that. Audrey Hepburn's father lived there, and I saw them walking together once. In summer, the place would be flooded with students from Spain and France, staying in Irish homes, learning English, while the Irish kids went to the Gaeltacht to study Irish.

Memories are made of this.