Safe Place Series: The Von Koch's Patisserie (Otzing, Germany)

1b: December 27, 1998, Rendeux, Luxembourg

Margret pulled the scarf tighter around the lower half of her face, hoping some warmth would reach her lips and chin. The wool tickled her face and made it itch slightly.

Snow crunched beneath her large feet, one foot after the other, she sunk into the shining banks. The sky was ominously clouded, but no snow fell from the clouds. The streets were quiet, but in the shadows a spark danced between two lovers.

Margret swallowed a lump of spit that wallowed at the back of her jealous throat. Margret longed for that feeling. The feeling of another person weaving their arms around you and planting a kiss on your cheek.

All the people she has gone anywhere with as a couple have broke it off with her, she would ask why and get no reply, except one feisty female told her that she was too boring. After that, Margret stopped seeing anyone. She felt like she didn't have the right to. If she was considered boring by the one woman, did the other males and females she spent time out with think the same of her? 

A cold wind nipped at her cheeks as she watched the couple from a distance. In the hazy sunlight that barely broke through the clouds, she could tell their arms were linked, two hands conjoined and cheeks pressed tightly together, perhaps to keep warmth, perhaps to feel closer. 

Margret wanted to dip her gloved hand into the shining banks, wad up a ball of virgin snow, and throw it at the two across the street, but instead, she turned curtly, and began walking once again, her blue eye lids squinting to keep the dry wind from her eyes. The sound of her loud footsteps leaving traces of her exsistance behind her. 

After leaving the US two years ago to study Old English and French in a city Luxembourge, Margret never felt more alone. She spoke very fluent French, English and German because her father was German, and her mother was French-Canadian. At the thought of her mother, sudden memories of her hazel eyes and dark hair overtook Margrets mind. The warmth of her hand, even the clammyness of it in the hospital bed. Her fathers hands were always so big and rough, he laboured for a living and Margret new she got her hands from her fathers side, and her facial shape from her mother. A round chin, with thin lips and large eyes.

She decided to take this walk to clear her mind. Less than maybe fifteen minutes ago, Margret recieved a phone call from a paper making facility in Germany. They had told her, in broken english, that they were going to tear down her grandmothers bakery because the company had bought the land. She had one month to clear out the bakery and sign the lease. Margret couldn't say no to this, she had no time to keep up a bakery, for one she hated cooking. She barely knew her grandmother, of course, her father would tell constant stories of her hardships during the war, while her mother sipped tea in two delicate palms, nodding after every other sentence of the story. Besides those stories, she knew nothing. And maybe it was time to find out, so thats why she agreed to spend one month in Otzing, Germany, starting next week. 

After the morning clouds cleared and Margret had made her way back to her apartment, a small row of buildings on a crowded street, each with yellow walls and a green door, with silver number imprints. Marget reached her green door and pulled out the key to it, letting it slide into the lock and turning it enough to hear a click. She turned the handle and pushed it open, sliding off her scarf and jacket and hanging them on a rack by her bed, letting the moisture drip and succumb to the wooden floor. 

Margret decided love was no longer important to her. For her it just never ever worked out. The only two people she had ever loved were her parents, who both died too young. Margret had always thought of herself as a bad luck charm, someone with emminated a glowing haze of bad luck. Both of her parents die, she's too boring to date and now she has to clear out a patisserie that her grandmother owned, that she feels absolutely no connection with. 

If she really had a choice, she would drop her studing and move to Colombia, or some place where it was warm, and her hardships and guilt about her parents could thaw and melt into the ground, watering the ageing crops of beans and corn and creating something better and more healthy for her mindset. But for now, she had frozen streets, frozen skies, frozen limbs and a frozen heart.