Having just returned from the back porch, where it is cold, but not as cold as I had expected it to be at this latitude so late in the Eleventh Month of the year, and the grass on the little lawn, though green, no longer growing, but for a single dandelion, and the sky overcast, gray, flowing en masse from the southeast-- gray, but on closer inspection all shades of gray, and not only gray, also the translucent cream from a hidden autumnal sun, and directly above, evidence of a clear blue sky beyond the clouds, but smudged, smeared with a pale gray, and if I were to spend enough time gazing at the gray, flowing mass I would find that it is not a gray mass at all, any more than a green or tan or camouflaged mass of soldiers is the singular mass it appears to be, or the singular mass its commanders would like it to be...
And having also just returned from the back porch where I quaffed down my second coffee and smoked my first cigarette, which I rolled from a pouch of Maya tobacco, which I want to believe that I chose from the tobacco shop at the end of Pützdorferstraße because it is cheaper tobacco than the others, but which I may have chosen subconsciously because the pouch is colorful, like a rainbow, or a pack of Lifesavers candy...
When I bought my first pouch of Maya tobacco, the shopkeeper told me it was a good choice, because Maya tobacco has no additives. Later, as I smoked, on closer inspection of the pouch I discovered that it was printed with climate neutral printing, and I felt good that I was helping to preserve the environment, as I exhaled additive-free, second-hand smoke into the somewhat climatically altered air, and I imagined that the Mayans had also smoked this brand of tobacco back when they were devising their calendar, which did not predict the end of the world, though New Age Europeans imagined that it had, and when the New Aged Mayan end of the world came about, last December, I had sung the 'End of the World Blues' at an end-of-the-world party in Asenovgrad, Bulgaria, where it was frozen and felt like the end of the world, and I had sung without inhibition as why be inhibited when it is the end of the world? And also because there was beer and wine and a good blues guitarist to cover my mistakes.
And what else can I say about Asenovgrad? We'd had a kind host there, Petar, and there had been an end-of-the-world party, and it had been frozen, covered in ice and snow, and the sky as white as the off-white snow, and though I could continue on about the people I knew and met there, and though I could describe the city as I saw it, I can say nothing about the history of the place, as I was passing through yet another city in a long list of cities.
But now here in Aldenhoven, and not just passing through, I can look beyond what I see in front of me, and get to know the place by digging into its past, in the very same way that one gets to know a person, though most importantly through the present, but also by the past life that shaped the present.
So, Siersdorf and Pützdorf already having been mentioned, I will now mention Niedermerz, and leave it at that-- Siersdorf, 3 or 4 kilometers from Aldenhoven, because US Army soldiers, after fighting house to house to capture that village, had set out from there to capture Aldenhoven, and because it is where I swim once or twice a week to train for the children's version of the triathlon; and Niedermerz, now connected to Aldenhoven, but back then a kilometer or two away, because it is where the fight for Aldenhoven took place in its greatest intensity, the US Army having captured it relatively easily, but then facing an unexpected German counter-attack from Panzers in the fields where I walk and converse with Bella der hund; and Pützdorf, back then half a kilometer away from Aldenhoven, but now this hamlet making up the south side of same, because I live on the road leading to it, now a 'suburban' neighborhood, but then farmer's fields, and because panzers trying to take Aldenhoven back clashed with bazooka-toting infantrymen on this road, perhaps in front of the driveway where I live, or perhaps where I am sitting now-- I will leave it at these three insignificant hamlets and villages because I could name every little village on this Rur River plain as having been center stage at one time or another in November and December of 1944 when armies clashed; when the Allies fought so hard to cover some 25 kilometers of ground to get to the Rur River, and then afterwards the Rhine, and when the German army fought so hard to stop them.
But breakfast is coming up, and I have Bella to walk in the fields where panzers once counter-attacked, and you haven't got time to hear about every village's battle either, as you also have to tend your garden, so I will leave it at those few hamlets and villages, this very brief but wordy history of the area.
But wait! Photos! And though you've already risen to go, you sit again with an almost imperceptible sigh.
The battleground today:
Downtown Niedermerz, the village next to Aldenhoven where soldiers fought house to house.
Panzers counter-attacked through these fields to retake the tiny village of Niedermerz.
A church cemetery near Niedermerz where some of the war dead are buried, both soldiers and civilians.
Pützdorf, a tiny hamlet now a part of Aldenhoven, where a few panzers rolled up our street in an attempt to retake the town. One one side, the fields remain. On the other, the fields and the country lane that connected the hamlet with Aldenhoven are now a park and Aldenhoven's 'suburbs'.
Okay, you can go now.
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