Plochingen

"Plochingen is beautiful," quipped my father-in-law with his twinkly, mirthy grin. We were driving from the Stuttgart airport to his hometown, which is now our hometown. One of the first things you see when you drive into Plochingen from the Autobahn is a bulking junk yard filled with scrap metal, like a magnified steel-wool forest. It's pretty ugly. Hence, the quip.

From where I sit, it's different. I'm sitting in my wife's old bedroom, which is in the basement level of their house. She grew up in the bedroom a floor above us, but when she was finished with high school, she and my father-in-law rebuilt the basement into a comfortable living space. My father-in-law built every part of the house. He builds and manages houses - even though he has the equivalent of a masters in engineering, he would rather be outside working with his hands then designing in an office on a computer.

The basement level actually has a door into the backyard. That's because the house was built into the side of a small mountain, so the front door, facing towards the summit, is a good three stories above the backdoor. One level up are two rooms, once and now bedrooms for family members, however far they wandered before. Above those rests a bright and spacious living room. On every level are balconies and wonderfully big windows that ensure the sun is a daily guest.

If I step out, I stand in the backyard, which is, to be more accurate, a garden. The side of the mountain is lovingly shaped with stone and grass and trees until you walk down, step by step, level by level, to the next row of houses and apartments. These include, incidentally, the residencies of my wife's brother, aunt and uncle and grandmother. It also includes an empty apartment where my family will begin its life in Germany. Blessing and grace, abundant.

Beyond those houses, I can see the town center (the aforementioned junk yard is, happily, beyond my line of vision). Plochingen invites the small town sort of life that I never experienced in the suburbs. It's a little place, but I can still walk downtown and find civilization: coffee shops, stores, cobble stone, statues and a big church. Where I sit, all the houses in the city below have matching red-tiled roofs, each with a high, pointy peak in the middle. They make their own spiky mountain range through the river valley, trying to keep secret the fact that they are individual units, made by the hands of man. The afternoon sun casts his golden blessing on the whole scene. Plochingen is beautiful.