The legendary fountain, Schöne Brunnen, was a side note. When we went to the Christkindlesmarkt in Nuremberg on a flurrying December Saturday with our very patient German friends, “turn the wishing ring” was not on my list of things to do. Things to do included the following: Eat grilled sausages. Drink gluhwein. Catch up with Carolin and Holger. Listen to Christmas music. Show 3-year-old Josie all the pretty things. Feed her copious sweets.

Finding a current, we swept along with the masses through the busiest Christmas market in Europe. Above us, at the edge of the hauptmarkt, towered the Frauenkirche, which had been rebuilt painstakingly, stone by original stone, after World War II. A choir sang of St. Nick, hope, and climate change. Snowflakes stuck to our knit hats and scarves. Mugs of mulled cider warmed our fingers. Josie licked the frosting off a gingerbread Santa.

Caught up in the crowd, we soon found ourselves facing the Schöne Brunnen, an ornate, sixty-foot, 600-year-old golden spire rising from the ground in the main square. One after another, tourists popped from the crowd to reach an arm up the wrought iron fence around the spire. Pulling off a mitten, they would take two fingers and grasp a brass ring twined impossibly through the ironwork. Most gave the ring three turns. Someone near me said something about the ring bringing good luck. With Josie in my arms, I stepped up to get my ration.

When we returned home to Amsterdam a few days later, I felt curious about the wishing ring. Had I turned it correctly? And what would my reward be? I began reading legends, which seemed only to lead to other legends. The “fountain” had been built to top the Frauenkirche, but when the time came to move the steeple, graced with forty exquisite limestone figures, the townspeople demanded that it stay on the ground where they could admire it. It would be called a fountain. And the ring itself? One legend said that an ironwork apprentice, wishing to prove himself to his master, installed the apparently seamless ring overnight. Another story said the apprentice crafted the ring as a symbol of his love for a nobleman’s daughter. Some held that turning the ring would bring luck. Others promised I would have a wish granted. Then I read that turning the ring a full 360 degrees would bring a baby to a hopeful young wife. I gulped—later, perhaps, but not now!—then calculated that I probably hadn’t rotated the ring a full 360 degrees anyway. Still, I was glad I had placed my fingers on this ancient craftspiece…until I read it was actually just a brass ring installed a mere century ago, shiny and easy for tourists to see. The original ring, supposedly, had blackened and now hid elsewhere in the fence lattice. And speaking of original, this was not the original fountain. The crumbled artifacts of the original are now housed in a museum, I learned. The fountain had been rebuilt in 1912, and restored again after the damage of World War II.

As I read, one corner of my mouth scrunched and curled down: darn it anyway. I had always loved Europe for its palpable history: the medieval, the ancient. I had always loved to behold an original just-about-anything, perhaps for the implication that permanence is possible. But the longer I lived in Europe, the more I had to face the fact that even “originals” weren’t original in the sense that I hoped. They had been shined up, brushed off, freshly painted, carefully epoxied, with most parts replaced.

*

After our return from Nuremberg, our American friend Jess came to visit. One afternoon, she played with Josie in the living room while I fixed coffee in the kitchen. I heard Josie ask, “What’s that?”

Jess called to me, “Should I tell her?”

“What is it?”

“The tattoo on my ankle,” she said.

“Sure,” I answered, laughing. “You can practice for whatever you want to tell your own kids someday.”

“This is Mommy’s mistake,” she jokingly rehearsed.

“But do you really feel that way?” I asked her as I filled our mugs.

“Well, the only thing is, sometimes I regret putting anything permanent on my body.”

That had always been my rationale for not getting a tattoo. But on the other hand, hearing Jess talk about putting something permanent on her body reminded me how very impermanent the body is. In the news, scientist had been saying that the average age of the body’s tissues was seven to ten years—and many cells lived even briefer lives. The surface of one’s skin, they said, renews every few weeks. Tastebuds, every ten days. White blood cells, overnight. Bone and brain cells seemed to have the most longevity—perhaps decades—but they would change over, too. So, even when the human body wasn’t stretching itself into an adult form—the work Josie’s body was doing every day—the original was never exactly original. When I looked at the very ends of my long hair, I didn’t have to go back very far to remember what I was doing when those hairs first sprouted: Asking Dan to take my picture next to our Christmas tree as I stood sideways, showing the small bump of our baby girl growing in my belly.

Josie and Jess had moved on to play “Where’s Bear?” over the back of the couch. But I kept thinking as I carried our steaming mugs: Physical impermanence is, of course, the reason we save a lock of baby hair, and why my mother keeps my primary teeth in her jewelry box. It is the reason the scent of my husband’s skin comforts me so: it is the same familiar pepper-and-bark, exactly right, even if little flesh remains from the day I met him.

Jess’s tattoo, I realized, could be a little anchor of something original and permanent in a sea of constant change. Maybe it didn’t matter whether the brass ring in the Schöne Brunnen was one century old or six. Maybe it didn’t matter if the fence around the fountain was the precise fence that the apprentice originally tinkered with. Perhaps it was unimportant whether the fountain was meant as a church spire, or whether water ever had anything to do with it. And possibly, it didn’t even matter if the fountain was a 600-year-old original, a replica built a century ago, or a 60-year-old restoration. The pieces held the place—in roughly the right shape—of something that would otherwise too soon have disappeared.