Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2011.

We hung a sign on the front door — “Welcome home, Axel.”

Axel was our German exchange student 42 years ago. He was 18. Now he is 60. He lived with us for a year, the year my son Peter was a senior at Redwood High School. Pete and Axel “graduated” together, wearing peace signs on their mortarboard hats.

Peter had been an exchange student in Preetz, Germany, for his junior year of high school. When the year was nearly over, he called to ask if he could bring Axel home with him.

Of course we said yes. What was one more boy when we already had five? It was a warm and wonderful year, and we talked about all of it, so long ago, when Axel came to visit last weekend.

Each of us remembered favorite moments. Axel, rosy-cheeked and mischievous, captured my heart immediately. We picked him up from the plane and drove directly to our cabin at Lake Tahoe, where our family traditionally spent summers. He loved it there: the laziness, the woods to explore and the lack of school-term discipline.

The months at Redwood were also his oyster. He did well academically, although grades did not matter; he would rejoin his class in Germany as soon as he got back. Life here was a swirl of activity, mostly after school. Our house had always been a bit of a mob scene, and the mob scene continued, with girlfriends and music and tons of snacks.

He loved listening to the serious discussions that went on in our kitchen. My then-husband and I were anti-war, and the Vietnam War, then in progress, gave us plenty to talk about. The PE staff at Redwood was, at that time, seriously opposed to long hair, which gave our sons an excuse to rebel. All, including Axel, enjoyed dressing as crazily as their imaginations would allow. Even I, liberal-minded as I was, disapproved of their bent toward lawlessness. “Question authority” was their mantra.

At the same time, they were pussycats at home, always in a jocular frame of mind, always a hoot to be with. Axel said last weekend that the year in the United States with our family had taught him more than Germany and his parents did in a lifetime.

Axel loved his brothers. The two younger boys, Gil and Guy, were his pets. I remember him carrying Guy on his shoulders at the beach and helping dress Gil for Halloween.

The day I drove him to the airport for his flight home, he lamented how beautiful the city looked in the sunshine.

“Why couldn’t it have been raining?” he muttered.

The next year, his sister Bettina came to Redwood, too. I still have the advent calendar she made me and the wooden tray she painted as a gift. Like Axel, she was mesmerized by Redwood. She fell in love with environmental activism, and, as a young woman, became mayor of her little town in northern Germany and today is in her second term in the Bundestag.

By the winter of 1971, my husband, Ross, had died of cancer. In the summer of 1972, Axel and Bettina’s parents urged us to come to the Munich Olympics, which I had planned earlier as a treat for our whole family. They outfitted a VW bus with sleeping bags and ice chests, procured tickets for track and field and basketball, and gave their blessing for Axel to drive us for a month around Germany, top to bottom.

The Munich Olympics were turbulent from the first — the record-breaking run of swimmer Mark Spitz, the much-debated U.S. loss to Russia in basketball and the horrendous slaughter of 11 Israeli athletes.

All our times with Axel were memorable indeed.

We continued to see Axel now and then after the Olympics ended. Once, when I had taken my boys to England on a home exchange, we met him in Paris; 11 years ago, he came over for Gilbert’s 50th birthday party in Sonoma.

Then, out of the blue in May, he wrote that he and his wife, Brigitte, were coming to California on vacation. Could I get the family together?

Easier said than done, of course. Ken had a business commitment in Clear Lake, his current home; Jeff had died two years ago; and Pete and his wife were traveling in Cuba. But Pete got home in time, and Gil and Guy and their families showed up, and we sat in the living room, then the patio, then at the dining room table so Axel could relive his days in each room: “I spent so many hours at this table, eating and doing homework and just talking to Dad,” Axel said.

So many years after it all started, we could laugh at some of the transgressions. They kept us on our toes, sometimes with scowls on our faces.

We never stopped loving any of them. They grew up happily and successfully; they cut their hair, found wives and launched careers. Axel became a highly sought-after photographer for Germany’s top fashion magazines.

Our evening together touched me in so many ways. I was at once wistful and sad for times and people I would never see again. I was also quietly joyful to see how many memories we continued to be thankful for.

Axel teased everyone unmercifully, at the same time raising sentimental toasts to the joys we had shared.

“Mum,” he said, “you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Neither have you, Axel,” I said, and I couldn’t stop smiling.