Münster, Germany, is too small to deserve its own labeled dot on many maps. One can walk or bike anywhere in the city.

Like a lot of cities in Germany, Münster began with the construction of a church. As time went by, folks settled down and built their homes in the shadow of that church, and a village was born, and then the merchants came and traded around the edges. Just another stop along the river, by the harbor, before there were train stations and steam engines, back when a boat on the water was nifty shortcut that could change the shape of the world.

The oldest buildings and streets are in the center of the city, in downtown. Even as the city expanded and sprawled outwards, the oldest part of the city remained at the center, like a heart. It’s like looking at the rings of a tree. But it’s not a perfect cross section across time, because Münster, like a lot of places in Europe, did not escape the bombs, and humans had to rebuild in places.

As one does.

I can sit here and I can talk about taking a cross section of time. But since the beginning, there’ve been people taking the long way, moment by moment. For lifetimes.

So the city continues. Every week, there’s still a market in the square by the church. The streets come alive with people. Friends and lovers and children and street folks. Bakers behind the counters of cafés on every corner. On market days, butchers, gardeners. The invisible people who put up the posters on the walls under the bridges. Musicians. People drinking beer on the sidewalks, perusing the displays in the shop windows. People on bicycles, so many bicycles, everywhere you turn…

There’s a bicycle path in the shape of a ring, called the promenade, that loosely defines the edges of downtown. The bike path is lined with warm, globular street-lamps and old trees, and there’s a footpath along one side of it, and playgrounds and parks, and it cuts across streets every few hundred yards.

There is this one place where the promenade slopes down under a bridge. Bicyclists can stop peddling, for a moment, on the otherwise level path, and feel the wind in their faces and watch the bridge whoosh by above their heads before the peddles click back into gear, and begin to push back against gravity.

While I was in Münster, I read Kathrin a wonderful book in which witches swooped across the sky. I doodled them at Kathrin’s table and tried to write about them on napkins in coffee shops. They seemed – almost at home, in a place where the buildings and the culture were so beautiful and old. Almost.

When my fingers got cold holding onto the handlebars of a bike, I wondered if that’s what it would feel like to hold onto a broomstick.

When the sun had set and the mists crept out from behind the trees along the promenade, the air felt thick with magic.

When Alyssa’s hair and Kathrin’s coattails trailed out behind them as the three of us went flying down the hill and under the bridge on our bicycles, it was easy to pretend we were witches.