When I was 6 years old, we moved into a new rental in Villach, Austria. I was mainly concerned with the lack of pink in my room and the huge backyard to be too concerned with the context of where we had moved. But it wasn’t very long before one of the new neighbor ladies, Frau Borovznik, came knocking. She had seen my brothers and me playing in the back and walking our new paths to new schools, and for some reason she was inviting me over to her house for games and a tea party. Looking back now, I’m somewhat shocked my mom said yes. Who lets their 6-year-old daughter inside a stranger’s house anymore these days?
One invite turned into multiple, and tea parties grew into regular dinners. Thus it was that over the next three years of living in that house, I spent roughly an evening a week in her small Austrian kitchen with the wood-burning stove, playing games. Frau Borovznik loved games: card games, word games, art games, board games, made-up games, all games. She’d ask me about school while we sipped our hot soup in the winter or cool elderflower juice in the summer, and I would secretly wonder if she was really this bad at Uno or letting me win. One time, she said the winner of Scattergories would get 10 Schillings, the equivalent of about 75 cents. When I won, my little 7-year-old self was suddenly afraid I had gambled, so I left the coin in the corner of my seat, but she found it and returned it to me the next day with a big grin on her face.
Every now and then Gabriel, her gardner, would join us for supper and games. He cultivated the most stunning array of flowers in the beds in front of the house, something I couldn’t really appreciate at that young age yet. Ahead of special holidays, Frau Borovznik and I would hunt through Gabriel’s masterpieces and create a bouquet of our own favorite selections. Then I’d accompany her on the 15-minute walk to the wooded cemetery up the road, where we would locate the plot with the headstone “Joseph Borovznik.” She would let me set our fresh bouquet into the vase while she lit a candle and said her Catholic prayers.
She was a very devout woman. The first time she showed up on November 25 with a present for me, I was baffled. “Happy Name Day!” “But my birthday is in February,” I insisted. “Right, but it’s your patron saint name day, silly.” And who was I to complain about extra presents. I was a bit too self-preoccupied to ask her what her first name was and when her name day was. But then again I was 8.
That house ended up being the shortest one we would live in, barely three years, and right or wrong, I wasn’t too interested in riding a bus an hour across town to visit an old lady and her gardner. So last summer was the first time in a while I spent a large chunk of time in Villach, and I decided to walk the streets of the old neighborhood. There was a family playing in Frau Borovznik’s yard, mom hanging laundry on the line while her kids ran through the old flower beds, now mostly dried earth. I entered the cemetery, sure that I would never find the exact path she and I had walked 30 years earlier. But somehow, call it the guidance of the Spirit, I made all the correct turns and was suddenly standing in front of the amended marble: “Joseph & Maria Borovznik.” Her first name was Maria. I don’t know what kind of a marriage they had, but I do know she was a kind lady with a generous heart to take the foreign family’s little girl under her wing for a few years. And sometimes I miss her.
