The house of my aunt

This is the house of my aunt.

She moved in when she got married in 1936, and never left. In 2007 she died, 94 years old, in the livingroom, in the hospitalbed with the pale green blanket. Four years earlier she had slept in the marital bed for the last time.

In seventy-one years hardly anything has changed. The sofa on which she had been painted as a young woman reading, was still there.

The house did get fuller and fuller over the years. She hung on to everything, read her many newspapers with a pair of scissors at hand, and copied every letter she wrote before mailing it. She stuffed all of it into her little writing desks, that she carefully kept closed. The house remained an amazing monument of times gone by, of culture and loneliness.

The last few years I had a difficult relationship with my aunt. Sometimes I was her nearest and dearest, sometimes she almost literally pushed me away. In the end I could not deal with it any more, but I did feel guilty. My brother is the only one who never fell from grace.