Springtime and Guests

Spring has been ambling in on little fat feet with an unsteady gait, on a path of wind and rain, bringing family visits and blossoms and renewal in many forms--along with often unpleasant walking conditions.  The lilacs are starting to pop, and the chestnut trees that shade the garden-restaurant tables are almost in full leaf.  The Wieners, not trusting Nature to bring up her tulips on a uniform schedule, have sent vegetation squads in orange trucks to plant tulips in full bloom on boulevards and allees and in parks.  This year's color scheme is purple and pink.  Outdoor tables again invite customers at Grinzing's restaurants, and when the rain takes a day off the people sit in dark winter jackets nursing coffee while the chill breeze carries last year's leaves past their feet and along the cobbled sidewalk.  Omnipresent cigarette smoke blows from the tables into Himmelstrasse and up the hill to Cobenzl, where it helps to cloud the view of Vienna that rests in the haze below the vineyards.  Now and again the sun comes out to light the purple and pink tulip beds, warm and soft like a luxurious robe after a cold shower.

Since our trip to Berlin in March, we have stayed around home--not because of the weather but for the best of all possible reasons:  visiting family.  Between the first two sets of guests (the third set arrives this week), on Easter Sunday Linda and I attended a Haydn mass at the Augustiner Kirche.  On Easter Monday we drove to the lakeside village of Rust to have lunch--and to bring home wine from the Elfenhof restaurant.  The storks in Rust are back in their rooftop nests preparing to have their own version of Easter eggs. 

Scene Selection:

-- Bruce and Beth, and Helen and Eve arrived at the very end of March.  We all walked the long path through the Vienna Woods and the vineyards up to Kahlenberg on one of the few sunny days while they were here.  The Saturday after their arrival we all went to the Prater amusement park, where, among other activities, we all rode the ancient ferris wheel, a century-old landmark of Vienna with its red box-car cabins, to look out on a cityscape mottled with haze and sunshine. 

-- At the Easter market in Freying square, the girls got a pretzel and hot chocolate while the adults browsed the market stalls.  Linda in particular loved the vast array of fragile, hand-painted eggs and examined each one.  I persuaded her to buy one with a picture of Empress Sisi on it. 

-- All got reacquainted with the empress on a tour later of Schonbrunn palace, followed by a ramble in the maze and a performance of The Magic Flute at the marionette theater.

-- At Durnstein in the Danube Valley, the girls climbed and scampered fearlessly on the ruins of the fortress that had once imprisoned Richard the Lionheart. 

-- After the visitors returned from a side-trip to Salzburg, we spent a day at museums downtown, including the Sisi Museum and the Treasury.  We ended the afternoon with a visit to the national art gallery.  In the last room we visited, I looked over to see Helen sitting on the solitary chair in the center of the room, with Eve on her lap.  Two tired girls...and the best of friends.

Our next set of visitors arrived a few days later:  Ben and Kristin.  It is wonderful to get a hug from someone the first time I meet them, and I got a nice one from Kristin, a charmer and a great guest, as was Ben.  The hug fixed a great memory, too, of greeting the two of them coming smiling through the doors into the arrival hall at the Vienna airport. 

-- Our first activity was a walk up the hill from Grinzing to Cobenzl, where we looked down through the wet haze at what should have been Vienna.

-- The rainy, cool weather seemed appropriate for our visit to the Mauthausen concentration camp a day later. 

-- The Steiermark festival at the Rathaus grounds featured beer and oompah bands, along with a circle of young men slap-dancing--flat-handed pounding of feet, thighs, arms, and each other to the rhythm of accordion music. 

-- And we had cold, wet walks to Grinzing restaurants and downtown and around Schonbrunn, which was largely a wash-out.

-- In the early evenings as we sat in the livingroom during happy hour with a glass of beer or wine, Ben and Kristin would chat with us in great animation; each of them would occasionally stop to look down and flick fingertips and type tweets on their iPads, staying connected throughout the visit with their network of family and friends halfway around the world. 

It was sad to see the guests depart.  It felt as if so much of the energy in our place left with them.  But more are coming, prolonging the best of spring. 

Empress Sisi's bathrobe, I have noticed in the press, is about to auctioned at the Dorotheum in Vienna and is expected to bring nearly $10,000.  She is, for Vienna, a goddess of eternal youth and beauty.  I imagine her robe to be purple and pink.