Last night, our little town had its first wine stand of 2026. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts about wine stands in Breckenheim, these community gatherings are held every other Friday night in the warm(er) months. They are usually hosted by clubs or special interest groups. It’s election season right now, so last night’s stand was attended by local politicians… a couple of whom happen to be our neighbors.
I had been looking forward to the wine stand. I enjoy hanging out in the Dorfplatz, drinking local wines, and sometimes chatting with people who deign to speak to Auslanders. However, last night, I did give a passing thought to not attending, because the weather was damp and chilly. I also wondered how we’d be received, thanks to our insane POTUS who keeps doing things to piss off our allies and alienate everyone in the world.
When I saw that it wasn’t raining at 6:00 PM, I told Bill we should go and have a glass… maybe stay a short while. Naturally, that’s not how it turned out for us. 😄 In fact, last night’s wine stand was kind of fun! We just had to wait a while for it to really begin. Below are a few photos I took before the party started.
We talked to our former neighbor, Daniel, who moved a few months ago after his divorce. Then, a group of friendly Breckenheimers showed up and asked if they could join us. One of them was a very talkative gentleman who spoke English and told us his daughter has lived in England for the past 30 or 40 years. He had with him his partner– not wife, as she explicitly told me, when I said that last night was the anniversary of the night Bill and I got engaged in 2002. She said she’d been married before, and was left in a good situation, so she wanted to stay independent. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In some cases, not getting married is better. But, if I had done that, it’s likely that I would be living in the U.S., working for Door Dash, or something.
There were a couple of other women and another older man with them, and they were a lot of fun to chat with. My worries about being an American in Europe– at least at this particular place in Europe– were unfounded. 😏 🤭 Then, the English speaking gent stood up and said he was going to get a bottle of Sekt for us to share. When he came back, he had two other men with him. One was an American guy from Maine named Alan (or Allen), who told us he’d been living in Germany since the 1980s!
He and Bill started talking, and Alan said he had come to Hessen with the Army and decided he didn’t want to leave. So he worked as a contractor at Clay Kaserne, where Bill works. Then he later got out of contracting, and worked for Lufthansa. He did other things and made a life here with his wife. The other guy was German, and he actually told us he thought Trump was going to be better than Kamala Harris… But then I got the impression that he’s since changed his mind.
We learned that Alan was here when Bill was, back in the 80s, when the Berlin Wall fell. And he’s maybe a year or two older than Bill is. I think they really hit it off– turns out he also knows our neighbors, also from the United States. But then, our neighbors seem to know everybody! I, on the other hand, have become pretty obscure.
The ladies at our table were surprised when we said we’ve been here for seven years. They said they hadn’t seen me around. I guess they never saw me walking the dogs through the neighborhood. Noyzi and Charlie are not as loud as Zane and Arran were, so we attract less attention, even though they are an unusual sight– Noyzi is a really big dog, and Charlie is a little dude.
We finally left the wine stand at about 8:30 or so, because I really needed to pee, and it didn’t look like they’d bothered to open the public toilet. I think the toilet is still a big topic of controversy in Breckenheim. I love that that’s the biggest issue around here. 😆
I’m glad we went to the wine stand last night. It seemed like a good omen to meet a fellow American who has been in Germany for so long and totally assimilated. He seemed delighted to meet us, too. And though we will be in Paris the next time they have a wine stand, I look forward to running into Alan and the other folks, again. They were nice to talk to, and made me feel better about the past couple of weeks.
I felt the same way last night as I did in the summer of 2014, when Bill and I went to Bacharach, on the Rhine, on the last day of our last hurrah military “hop”. We sat in our now favorite Biergarten, and I said, “I feel like we’re going to move back to Germany.” And sure enough, six weeks later, that’s exactly what we did. I can be pretty intuitive sometimes… Of course, I couldn’t know in 2014 that we’d end up moving to a town less than an hour’s drive from Bacharach, which was the first German town I ever visited. Maybe things are coming full circle.
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