Sasuage!

Instead of waking up early, I stayed up all night with James in Prague to catch the 6AM train to Blindenmarkt, Austria, short layover in Linz. I finally arrived in Blindenmarkt and walked, literally, "across the street" to the house of my Rechenmacher relatives. It's quite convenient that there house is so close to the train station. I was a little hesitant in visiting them because they're my relatives I didn't know them at all.

My grandparents have visited them many times and many of their children, my aunts and uncles, have also visited. In 1998, they made a trip to the states and visited my parents in Santa Cruz, but I was at school up in Chico.

I met them for the first time when I had stopped by their house two weeks ago when I was in Blindenmarkt with Ingaborg and Bernhard Blˆchl's family visiting her parents.

After a choppy conversation in very simple English, because I didn't speak any German and Josef's English was limited, I still felt a little uncomfortable, but they had insisted that I stay with them.

SoÖ after all day on the train, catching up on sleep lost from a night of debauchery in Prague with James (That was a great night, eh, James?), I arrived in Blindenmarkt and trekked the 30 meters across the street to their house.

I walked in and was taken to a small room just off the courtyard. In the room Josef, his mother Hilda (who also lives in the house), Josef's brother Ernst, and his sister-in-law Helen, were cutting up pig parts. I wasn't sure what to think because I had seen these pigs, alive and well, two weeks ago. Yet this morning they got the parts back from a cousin, who had done the dirty work, and now the parts were lying in a huge pile on the table ready for processing into manageable chunks.

[sep 'n' ribs] [helen] [helen & ernst] [rolling] [yep it comes out ot that] [mixen the meat] [ Like clockwork: I turn the crank to squeeze the sasuage out of the cylinder, sep guides the meat into the intestine, oma twists, cuts, and measures] [sa-moked] [ribs, too] [pre-sausage]

Growing up the son of hippies who were pretty strict vegetarians, the table's mountain of meat gave me the queasy feeling I get walking down the supermarket meat isle. Keeping my distance, I took some photos and observed their skill as they mined the mountain, wrapping some portions in plastic and hanging others in the smoker.

The smell of jerky in the room growing on me, I began to understand that this is a part of their way of life and that this "family ritual" has been done for generations and will most likely continue for generations.

The photographic opportunities began to stale, and feeling a bit useless, I got a primal urge to get my hands dirty. I offered to help and was promptly given a freshly sharpened knife, virgin apron, and the task of cutting the lesser portions of meat from six discarded joints and three shoulder blades of the one-and-a-half total pigs in the room.

I'm not sure what my dad, "looking down on me," would think about his eldest son being elbow deep in pig-parts, but as I cleaned the last shoulder and looked around the room I now felt much more comfortable here with my relatives.

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