
Rosemary & Sage

Vintage Blog

Do I believe in minimalism? Nope! I do believe in clutter free, in keeping everything tidy and clean, but this minimalism movement is nothing for me. I do need my surrounding to look beautiful. I enjoy nice pieces of decoration, not too many tho. Instead of stuffing my entire home with all sorts of random decoration pieces I rather go with a few handpicked special items, like this 160 years old kitchen scale in my kitchen or this little gargoyle statuette by the tree in my roof garden. For me, decoration does add some happiness to the home. It just should not get out of control, because that would end in clutter and that is something I want to avoid at all cost. Clutter is anti happiness. So I follow the simple rule: Do I really need that? And does it make me happy? If it doesn’t make me happy, it has to go.

Honestly, I do not remember. My childhood wasn’t nice, there was a lot of loneliness, abuse and trauma. My parents where not good parents. So I turned to books. I started early and I read whatever I could get my hands on. The first ones where the typical German kids books, like “Peterchen’s Mondfahrt”, “Räuber Hotzenplotz” und “Die kleine Hexe”, then everything from Enid Blyton and Astrid Lindgren of course. As a teenager I turned to books for grown ups. Jaws, long before the movie was out, the biography of Rose Kennedy, Lord of the Rings of course. There was this one book that hit my like a truck. “Das Mädchenorchester von Auschwitz” (The musicians of Auschwitz), a autobiography of Fania Fénelon. I remember, I started in the early afternoon and read the entire book without break through the entire night, crying along the way. I still start to cry when thinking about that book. That day I learned that the cruelty of humans has no limits.
Today I’m at the end of my 50ish and I still “read” (I switched to audio and ebooks at some point, because my home is too small for all the books) every day. I adore Terry Pratchett and I miss Marion Zimmer-Bradley. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher are a must every year. There are so many awesome authors that I never run out of books I want to listen to.
Hhhmm still can’t remember the first book I ever finished. Can you?
