Woke late, found it October all of the sudden, took the route through the wooded valley off the Himmelsleiter. Got caught behind a class of students also taking the steps up but who mysteriously vanished. Pocketed a fresh chestnut fallen from a tree at my feet like some offering, had Charlotte’s name on it. I give my kids things like this and they just smile and look confused. Like the time Eberhard gave my mom a jewelry box with one of his teeth pulled out from the dentist’s, old world-weird.

At the top of the Himmelsleiter on the ridge there’s an old shrub overgrown on both sides cut out in the middle to look like two hands clasped in the shape of a heart. It’s cool and shadowy underneath with an oval of light on the other side. The stone steps are crooked like an old man’s teeth or broken piano keys. Little stone structures not much bigger than a dog house by the vineyards and meant for old tools. Faded wooden doors with rusted locks. Ivy-choked apple trees and the fruit that perfect, still-life red. Freshly pruned shrubs cut down to the bone. The sound of tractor engines and men at work. Phantom tractor tread marks on the asphalt caked in fading mud. Apples along the path riddled by worms.

And everywhere people in pairs walking with their dogs, this more civilized time of day most people take their morning strolls. Dogs off leash in the dewy grass playing with one another; the students emerged from behind me and one just kicked an apple / almost hit me. The little boys in varying sizes each with their backpacks; how much of a statement that is, your backpack design. Remembering our kids and theirs, how the ratio of backpack to child seemed comical. Weighted down by the weight of the world. Or industry.

I will get ahead of the kids in the valley to the sound of birdsong and the babbling creek and their German banter will dissolve. A perfectly cool autumn morning in southern Germany with some of the leaves turning golden brown like mustard. Then the bigger trees in the distance and the bonafide forest with its woodcut signs announcing the way and the hunter’s treehouses meant for scouting deer, the stacks of firewood laid out for seasoning and carefully marked with some elaborate German numbering scheme, the serif different than ours on the ones. Ivy and moss clung to the stone walls at the base of the vineyard slopes, a place for small lizards now to snooze in the cracks.

The valley holds its memories too of times coming here through the years. How the paved path splinters off to other destinations and the times I went exploring adjacent villages and towns. Old wooden benches strategically placed for a good rest. Sometimes cars coming past, often bicycles, though the road’s not much wider than an adult laid on their side. Branches pruned and just left to rot, a fallen tree off the creek still in bloom. Each scene a medieval painting with the old huts in the orchards and the trees dotted with turmeric. Some trees leafless and helpless-looking reaching upwards like why me? Then splotches of perfect blue in the sky as the clouds give way.

I take the route off the road named after the German word for crocodile, a large old log shaped and carved like one. They are not roads as much as ways. There’s a place off the valley where the local school children plant a tree at the end of their last school year and some are quite old, the wooden signs now eclipsed by the tree’s overhang. And I imagine students grown older, coming back to find their tree with a loved one and remembering what they could of that day it was planted. It looked like a longstanding tradition, a way to literally feel rooted to this place. I felt that way too but it was more through memory, through what I’d written. Breadcrumbs in the forest.

When I emerged from the woods the school children were doing the same, coming from the other direction on the path. They were happily talking and laughing, some with walking sticks, greeting or regarding me with suspicion. They were maybe high school aged, which was odd because I could have sworn they were elementary school kids when I first saw them. I thought to myself maybe they’d gone through a time warp, funny that.

Dark clouds moved across the distant hills with sunspots beaming through. The windmills and radio towers got overtaken by the clouds with only the base of them still visible. The green of the distant fields and slopes, combined with the mixed quality of light was like so many scenes from a European countryside. The token church tower and farms. I guess it’s what you would call pre-industry, simpler times.

Cool with sweat I put my vest back on and got my head ready to start the work day.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Poetry, prose