The narrow street twisted and turned in the hills. My wife, Dyonne, and I squinted at the foreign street signs and checked the map. The late summer sun was sinking in the sky; quaint old buildings hugged the road.
“We’re almost there,” I said. Almost at the end of a journey that had lasted nearly my entire life.
It began with the painting. A formidable castle crowning a hill, bathed in light, with towering oaks in the foreground and peasants with carts and horses traveling down a dirt road.
I’d never seen any place like it. Not around Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the painting hung above the davenport in the parlor of my grandparents’ Victorian home.
I would play with my tin soldiers on the rug, fighting imaginary battles, and stare up at the castle on the wall, my castle, wondering if I would ever walk its ramparts one day. “It’s a castle in Germany,” my grandmother told me. “They have lots of castles there.”
Where, exactly? I asked. I couldn’t imagine another castle like this one. It almost seemed to cast a spell over me. My grandparents couldn’t say.
Couldn’t we see it someday? They had come over from Germany when they were young and had no intention of going back. Besides, neither they nor my parents could afford a European vacation back then.
I grew up, went off to college, got a good job with General Motors. As for the castle, it took on a legendary, mythical quality.
In my mind, it was a symbol of what was beyond everyday life, a place on the other side of my imagination. Perhaps it was just a fantastical place, like the castles in storybooks.
My grandparents died and my aunt Margaret lived on in their old Victorian. I asked her if she knew where the castle was. “Nuremberg,” she said confidently. She didn’t remember her source, but she was sure.
“You like the painting, don’t you?” she said. “I’ll tell you what. You can have it…someday.” She wrote Nuremberg on the back of the painting along with the words Carlton’s picture.
Aunt Margaret went into assisted living at age 98 and the picture came to me. Dyonne and I gave it a place of honor over the mantel of our house in Michigan. I retired from General Motors and the travel bug bit us. At last, maybe, we could find my castle.
I went on the internet and browsed through images of Nuremberg. Old narrow streets, churches, half-timbered houses…but the only castle there didn’t match. I searched other German cities.
My grandmother was right; there were lots of castles in Germany, more than 1,600. Dyonne and I visited several. None of them were my castle.
I guess it’s not meant to be, I thought. I was a grown man, for goodness’ sake, with kids and grandkids of my own. It was time to stop thinking about storybook castles. The painting would have to be enough.
I made other trips to Europe with an organization of Christian businessmen. During a break at a conference in Romania, I went for a walk and passed an antique store, full of local stuff.
I am not the sort of person who goes antiquing, but I had this feeling. Maybe there’d be some knickknack for Dyonne. I stepped inside. It was then that I saw it—the image of a castle, my castle, emblazoned on a ceramic plate. Wait. This was Romania, not Germany. It didn’t make sense.
I was tempted to bring it home to make a comparison, but the shopkeeper quoted me a price of $80. Eighty bucks! For a plate?
I snapped a picture of it instead. Back in the States, I compared images. It was a punch in the gut. They matched, exactly. It was as though God had put a big clue in my path and I had ignored it. I called a friend who was going to Romania and told him about it.
“I know this is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but I’d gladly give you the money to buy that plate, if you could find it …”
Amazingly, he did.
Guess what, though? There was no indication on the plate as to where it had been made. It only confused things. Romania or Germany? I was no closer to finding my castle. The clue had been a red herring. A bit spitefully, I put the plate on the mantel below the painting.
One day our German friend Johanna dropped by and commented on the new addition to our décor. “That’s Wartburg Castle, in Eisenach, Germany,” she marveled. “Martin Luther hid there for a year while translating the New Testament into German.”
Martin Luther’s castle? Dyonne and I booked a flight to Berlin, picked up our rental car and drove south to Eisenach. Ten miles away, we sighted the castle’s silhouette on a distant hill, but then it disappeared behind the trees. My heart quickened.
We stopped at our hotel first only to learn it was too late to visit the castle. “Tomorrow you can go,” the concierge said sympathetically. “Have dinner on our veranda tonight and rest up.”
So many obstacles, I thought, dejected once again. How could I wait any longer?
Dyonne and I unpacked our suitcases and headed downstairs for dinner. We walked through to the veranda. I looked up. And there it was. The castle, my castle, looming directly above me in the gloaming, the light shining on it just as in the painting.
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