Milena ist da!

That was the title of an email in my yahoo account yesterday. The Sender's name, Mirko Leitner, didn't ring a bell for a moment... then *click* I realized that it was from Bettina's husband!

Bettina was my host sister waaaay back on my very first trip to Germany on a three-week high school exchange. I was fifteen, she was seventeen, and we'd neither met nor exchanged a letter or a call before she came to the Munich airport to pick me up. In fact, I didn't even know if she and her family knew I was coming-- the whole thing had been arranged at the last minute. The spot had opened only due to some parent's nervousness about travel abroad in the wake of the first Gulf War. The girl who had originally been slated to stay with Bettina and her family was no longer planning to do so, but the family still wanted to host, so... my German teacher invited me to join the group.

It would be difficult to find a kinder, more generous, more loving host family than
the one I found myself in. Depsite my abysmal (that is, basically non-existent) German skills, we had a grand time getting to know each other. They were so patient with me, explaining why they ate or said or did certain things. And they kept me involved with their daily life, so that I never felt isolated, even when Bettina-- the only one in the family with any English skills-- wasn't there to translate for us. I was so in love with Germany after living with them for those three weeks that I came home and started searching for an exchange program so that I could go back and live there for a longer time.

When I came to visit them during my exchange year, we were all thrilled to discover that we liked each other just as much when we could actually talk to each other as when we could imagine only the nicest things coming out of our mouths. And I was so happy to finally get to share with them and to talk about my thoughts and to understand theirs. And on top of that, Bettina's mom is The Best Cook Ever. And she always goes all out when I visit them. After more than 10 years, she still remembers my favorite foods from my three week sojourn with them.

And whenever I visit, my former lack of fluency is discussed (usually together with much laughing remeniscence about the time I told them that I was completely drunk-- when what I meant was that I'd had enough to eat-- and the time that my host mom asked if I wanted more, but I thought she was asking if I'd had enough, so I answered "Yes" and was shocked when she dumped a huge ladleful of food on my plate: "Du hättest dein Gesicht sehen sollen! Da hast du weder ein noch aus gewusst!" you should have seen your face, you didn't know which way was up!. They think it is just too precious for words that I'm fluent now and back then I couldn't even tell someone my name, ach unsere liebe Katze. Schön, dass du wieder da bist.

And now Milena ist da-- my first honorary German niece. We've been planning for years that Bettina would send her children to Tante Katze to learn English every summer-- and so that I can spoil them silly and send them back to Germany, where they'll whine about how much better it is in America-- a thought that amuses me to no end, as I spent a lot of my youth whining about how much better it is in Germany.

Milena, schön, dass du endlich da bist. Ich freue mich darauf, dich kennenzulernen. Du hast immer bei mir ein zweites Zuhause.