Großonkel

Every day for the past week and a half, this awesome photo has been staring down at me when I'm sitting at the table:



So today, I finally asked Farmer Lydia, "Who's the distinguished gentleman in the photo?" The story she told me begs repeating; as such, I shall attempt to translate and summarize as best I can.

The gentleman is her Great Uncle, born in 1893. He was sort of the black sheep of the family - a very smart guy, but a bit of an alternative sort. Apparently he was a "communist without a party;" he held communist ideals but didn't agree with the implementation at the time, leading him to write protest letters to Stalin and Mao and such. In any case, he apparently really didn't agree with Franco's dictatorship in Spain, so he joined the International Brigade and left Germany to go and fight the good fight on the Iberian Peninsula. In the late 30s, Franco joined forces with Hitler, and when Great Uncle was captured by Franco's forces, he was branded and enemy of the state and sent on a train bound for Auschwitz. The train's intended path went through southern France, through Paris, and then on to Poland. Luckily for them, the French freedom fighters were having none of it - a group of them descended on the train on horseback, took control, and freed all the prisoners. LIKE IN THE WILD WEST. Great Uncle spent the rest of the war hiding out in a small French village. When he eventually returned to Germany, he retired and spent his time, among other things, posing as a model for art students.

WHAT!

MOTOR SCYTHE

One week at the Sonnwendhof and everything is going great. We found two tiny baby kittens behind the straw bales and they are wicked cute. The lambs are mostly better - they got worm meds just in case and no one else has died since I've been here. That's a good thing. My camera is going in the mail tomorrow so you'll just have to wait until you get photos of the children.

I've been doing quite a bit of pasture-maintenance work, including learning how to use a MOTOR SCYTHE (weed whacker, okay, but the German name is cooler) to clear the bank of the river for use as grazing land. Basically cool stuff like that. And mucking out the barn. Which, surprisingly, I'm totally down with. Just throw on a podcast, grab a pitchfork, and git 'er done.

But it's also great going out with Lydia to take care of the sheep and other various and sundry. One might think, because they don't market their products and such that the work here is less serious, but they are mad serious about their sheepies and really care about their little piece of land. There is probably less work, in terms of hours, but because of that Lydia and her son have the time to stop and rattle off facts for five minutes about livestock or pasture management or the ancient Roman history of the area or what have you. It's always good stuff.

Since practically all of the older hens are molting at the moment, i.e. not laying eggs, Farmer Lydia decided we should get a couple new ones. So a dude with an awesome Fu Manchu moustache came today and delivered TWENTY-FIVE plus a turkey. I guess the turkeys are supposed to scare off hawks, which tend to munch on the chickens. Anyways it was a lot of chickens.

Apropos today, the other WWOOFer and I took a little field trip to Bad Wimpfen, a beautiful old medieval town not too far from here. There are actually quite a few of those around here, each with its own castle on a hill and cool little storybook houses and such. I didn't have a camera, so here are a couple photos I stole from the interwebs: