October 3, 2009. Byron and Maren (Paasch) were married on the German North Sea island of Sylt. They had known each other for 40 years. Maren was a manager in the theater in Essen in 1969 when Sakiko began her opera career there, her father was Sakiko’s agent, and her stepmother was one of Sakiko’s voice teachers.
From 2008 to 2014, we lived in Bremen (Germany) in a beautiful apartment overlooking the local botanical garden. In 2014, we moved to an even more beautiful house in Osnabrück, the city in which Maren had grown up. This move meant that we were only 2.5 hours from Barry and Dennis in The Hague and Leiden, 1.5 hours closer than we had been in Bremen.
And in 2019, we moved into our own house, just 800 metres from the old one. Maren’s sister and two nephews live around various nearby corners. We did a large remodeling before we moved in, a process that we discovered was almost like building from the ground up. Maren thinks the final product is “too big” (German) and Byron thinks it’s “just right” (American).
