Tuber melanosporum, the black winter truffle, sat under glass in the Italian restaurant in my small village of Strudelbach, Germany. It looked like a lump of coal with goosebumps. Suspicious. Slightly judgmental. Like it had seen my chat history.
I stared at it and thought, “Is that all there is?”
How could something so expensive be essentially… dirt with ambition?
Later, they shaved about half a day’s worth of man stubble over my pasta. I smiled politely. I was being treated. My husband beamed in that quiet European way that says, we are doing something culturally significant, try not to joke about it. I knew I should be burning this into memory, as if I’d be tested on it later in bed.
We were there because of me.
Or more precisely, because of neighbours.
The town had organised an art exhibition featuring residents. Emails had blanketed the village asking for volunteers willing to be “portrayed.” Apparently, after 20 years of living in Strudelbach, I had graduated from “a black lump to be watched” to “curated object”.
They hung my photo upstairs in City Hall, next to Frau Chapell, a French widow.
Frau Chapell has lived in Germany, I’d guess, since before bread. She opened and closed the church and acted as secretary and scribe of all things. Her husband had been in the German military. There were about 20 of us on the wall – distant neighbours, though we knew one another through village hearsay.
The restaurant leaned into history the way old European places do. Wooden beams. Crooked floors. A candle flickering as if it held secrets. I imagined all the eyes that had passed through here over the decades. Farmers. Lovers. People who explained their relevance through lineage because they had kept locks of hair and baby footprints alongside lace and family silver. They knew they belonged because they had grown in this soil.
And, now me.
Exhibit A: The Neighbour Who Planted Herself Here
For 20 years, I have lived under the gentle, watchful gaze of this village. Not hostile. Not warm. Just… observant. As if I were a melanoma.
“She is still here.”
“She laughs too loudly.”
“She speaks German like she’s assembling IKEA furniture without instructions.”
I have been, at various times, the foreigner, the curiosity, the one who waves too enthusiastically. Once, a neighbour watched me parallel park for so long I considered asking her to help. But she was simply observing, like a social scientist. Not malicious. Just… noted.
And, somewhere along the way, I began to wonder, What was I meant to become here?” Was I supposed to blend in? Soften? Become quieter, more contained, less… me?
Or was I meant to sharpen? To become more of myself, even if that self comes with volume and opinions about truffles.
The exhibition didn’t answer that. It simply framed it.
There I was on the wall. My face looking back at everyone in the room. Categorised.
A neighbour.
A noun.
Becoming… Insights From The Truffle
I twirled my pasta and thought about the truffle again. Buried underground for most of its life. Invisible. Then suddenly luxury. Shaved thin. Admired. Slightly confusing. Of value, even if no one really knows why.
Is that the journey?
Hide. Grow. Emerge. Then be grated onto someone else’s experience?
Yet, here I am. Not blended. Not entirely understood. But undeniably… present.
Which brings me to becoming.
Somewhere between the truffle and the exhibition, I realised something deeply inconvenient.
I don’t think becoming is peaceful. I think it carries the irritation of growth. The quiet discomfort of noticing you never quite became what you thought you would. And, that you will never be what others expect of you either. You will always simply be becoming.
At the same time, what you have become is somehow more specific.
More… you-shaped. Less polished. More real.
I looked around the restaurant. The candle flickered. A couple whispered in the corner. A waiter moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who knows every stair and no longer trips.
Reimagining Peace… Deeper Insights From The Truffle
I thought, “Have I found peace?”
Not the kind they sell in books. But something else.
A working peace. A slightly amused acceptance.
A peace that says, you are being watched… and that’s okay. Because you are also watching. You are participating. You are here.
You didn’t disappear. You didn’t become invisible.
Instead, you became someone who can sit under a candle in a centuries-old restaurant, eat questionable fungus and laugh at the idea that this is somehow the destination.
Maybe there is no place of belonging, only a posture.
A willingness to sit in the middle of your life and say, “Well… this is interesting.”
Even when it’s awkward. Even when it’s observed.
As we left the restaurant, I glanced once more at the truffle under glass. Still lumpy. Still mysterious.
I nodded at it. Respect.
You and I are not so different. Brought into the light. A little misunderstood.
And, somehow, like everything on earth, of value. Divine.
