Frauen die malen, drücken sich vor der arbeit. (Women who are artists don’t want to do housework). Instead of a couple of hours of cleaning and then a pleasant lunch, maybe even a last visit to a museum, it was clean, clean, all day. Once one starts to look for dirt marks they are everywhere and have to be cleaned in a systematic way or else one just treads marks back in. The refrigerator and the stove to be cleaned, drawers to be emptied, everything off the walls, packing to be done. Well it couldn’t all get in to those ridiculously small cases. How did it all get here? What I couldn’t take back I left behind, giving some to Cathy, in the studio upstairs and the rest I put at the top of the entrance foyer stairs in that wonderful Berliner way: CDs, marking pens, tapes, films, new socks not the right colour, tinned foods, masonry nails, bottles of beer, plastic basins, paper plates, extra cups, etc. All useful stuff but I had to fly back.
Leave when you love a place, means it will always stay with you. So Berlin is part of me now.
Au revoir. Remember me.
