Sauerkraut

whenever i eat sauerkraut i like to say it like my austrian auntie.

she isn’t actually my auntie and is in fact an old friend of my parents. she also doesn’t reply to my texts, but i continue to send them, she even doesn’t respond when im practicing my limited German and updating her on the goings on of my pregnant or newly mothering friends.

she was the most self-assured, statuesque woman i have ever met. She was about six feet tall and had wild grey hair and never wore makeup. she is a midwife and the full wife of a very wealthy surgeon who buys her cartier for all her birthdays even though she only wears athletic clothing because she is either doing some extreme exercise or being shit and vomited on by babies.

the accent has become something very dear to me as despite us being so different she took great care of me and also confided in me endlessly. Her accent was tyrollean and differed from those of the rest of her family, it was meaty and gauzy like a person might sound if they were raised with limited human contact; she however had just been raised in the mountains. we would drive to yoga and she would tell me all about the babies and mothers she had seen that day; who had reached birth weight, who was struggling, who was constipated. she told me about her marriage and the issues she had with her children. she talked openly of her menopause in a way i can only assume is very Austrian.

with her abundant money because of her wealthy husband she only bought organic food and it was incredibly austrian in character. goats cheese and sauerkraut and vegetables and sausages. she would buy twenty kilograms of avocados at once.

When i stayed with her and her family over Christmas i was deeply affected for reasons i still dont fully understand. The intensity of their family and their commitment to the mountains and to movement was foreign to me but i was entranced by the existence of this alternate reality where one skis on the mountain behind their home in the morning before work as if it were a pilates class. When i was with their family i felt like i was suspended between the parents, who were friends of my parents and therefore saw me as a child (when we called my parents on Christmas Day she said ‘thank you for letting Lucia come and stay with us’ despite me living on my own in Italy and being 25) while their children, had late in life as was entirely characteristic of their dynamic, were still in high school and therefore saw me as an adult whom they were unsure they could trust. I alternated between wanting to befriend them and wanting to be an adult, spending my time by myself either reading or in the woodfired hot-tub that they jokingly called the ‘hot-pot’. I loved the way they spoke English.

I would wake up to the highest piling of snow i had ever seen and she would welcome me upstairs and say that she promised there would be enough snow tomorrow for me. As if this amount of snow was pathetic and she were embarrassed by her mountain and her valley and thought i would be disappointed. I would stand outside in the sun and submerge my feet, freshly roused from a brick-heavy and dream-ridden sleep, into the snow that met my mid-shin. It was as if i was in a trance as i would stand there in pain, unmoving, as the cold burned my feet.

One day we went sledding and her children were so fast i felt terrified and inadequate as someone who greatly fears losing physical control. She told me that despite her fears of her children hurting themselves, she had done everything they did and more as a child, because rules were more relaxed and parents cared less about the wellbeing of their children. I imagined her childhood to be full of yodellers and fur pelts but in fact it was full of long treks across mountain peaks and gliding through forests on wooden skis.

I spent some time after being with her wanting to be a midwife, in the way that she was—but it takes a lot more formal training to do that nowadays, maybe because Austria has more respect for folklore and traditional methods of childbirth and because its just how things are now. I wanted to be holistic and stern and wise and also very rich, a walking contradiction just like my Austrian auntie who never replies to my texts. I wish i could say i see my future and it is bright but i dont have any money or the prospects of marrying someone wealthy and i also didn’t grow up on a mountain and im not six foot tall. At most i can admire her from afar and imitate her accent when i want to feel the strange swelling of awe she instilled in me from the moment i saw her at the train station.