I said those words today as I walked into the painting gallery of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of the greatest collections of art in Europe, and then I wept, privately, of course, but such moments do that to me, so grateful for the opportunity to stand before paintings that make my heart sing, so grateful for art and great practitioners.
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I’ve begun again sojourning through Europe searching for the final pieces to complete my new book.

It feels different now than it did on my first journey to discover my parents’ trail through Europe, which they made right after World War Two. That trip of mine was two and one-half years ago, on the heels of my mother’s death.

Today, here in Brussels, I passed again so many of the places where my Mom and Dad once were. I saw them in my mind in their leather coats, wheeling their bikes, hollering over shoulders to each other. The power of their stories from that trip still influence me—and guide the narrative of this book—but something new has happened in the intervening years, and it is that which I intend to chart during this current trip across the Continent, along with a million impressions about Germany and the long arm of Hitler.

I’ll travel from Brussels through the Netherlands, on to France, then into Germany, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, and finally Italy—with a lot of criss-crossing back-and-forth going on along the way.

Stay tuned. I’ll be sharing photos here, and my continuing understanding of the power of family stories and how they shape our lives.

Here are some random images gathered today as I wandered through a surprisingly dry and warm Brussels, Belgium. The first three are from the Belgian garden of a dear friend who I have stayed with at the start of this journey. She was once a student of mine, a visiting student from Finland at Augustana College in Illinois, where I ran the Journalism Program. This remarkable young woman went on to become a foreign correspondent for Finnish television, and an expert in EU matters. You see her here at play with Bruno.

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Family. Home. What is left after parents are gone and you set out to find your life in the terrain that opens around you?

I have returned for my annual writing retreat at The Big Six Country Club, our family cabin in the Sandhills of Nebraska. The book I write unfolds before me. Writing memoir is the act of making sense of your life, and I am in the heart of making sense of the last years as my mother became ill and then died, and the choices I made in those months surrounding that loss. Once again I am reminded, as I craft sentences and jockey events into scenes, that it is through storytelling that we invent our understanding of what it all meant.

Here I am with brother Billy who has come up to the cabin for a weekend visit, to do what we had been putting off for over a year, the spreading of my mother’s ashes. In a divine moment of surprise, a neighbor friend showed up as we were returning to the yard of the cabin. We had just walked back from The Point, a piece of land with a view of the north end of the lake and the marsh, a place our mother loved. The neighbor walked into the yard hoisting a camera. She’d had a notion, she said, to walk over to The Big Six and capture an image of the brother and sister who own it.

Life at this old place of memory is full of such divine moments.