Gray German Thanksgiving

I was cleaning out my study and came across a photo I had taken 30 years ago when I was living and teaching in Germany. It’s not a particularly scenic photo, not of any historic or cultural import, pretty mundane really, perhaps with a bit of balance, though not artistry. It’s of a field, covered in probably half a foot of snow. In the foreground on the left are some posts, remnants of a long-gone fence, leaning toward the edge of the shot, as if sensing an escape, leafless stems of weeds surrounding them. In the foreground on the right is a stand of dead brush and sunflowers, falling toward the right of the shot, creating a leaning balance of elements. In the distance, beyond a field of snow, is a pine- and fog-covered hill. The sky is dark and low. The scene looks to be in sepia, browns and grays and whites, though it’s actually in color. There just wasn’t any color that day. Maybe that’s why I took it in the first place, and why I had it blown up in development to 8”X10” and had it pinned to my office wall for most all of the past 30 years.

It was Thanksgiving Day, 1981. I was living alone in Litzendorf, Germany, a tiny town outside Bamburg, where I was teaching for the military. It wasn’t a holiday in Germany, and I’d followed my usual routine that morning – as the coffee was brewing, I went across the street to the bakery for a kasse küche; listened to the radio and read for an hour or so; went for a long jog in the falling snow through the Geisfeld Forest to Geisfeld and back; more coffee, more reading; lunch at the pizza restaurant, run by two Moroccan brothers, below my apartment. And then north the few blocks north on Am Knock street, past the church and cemetery, and into the dead fields of hay, beets, and parsnips. Into that silence and solitude of that gray snowy scene. There was nothing beautiful about it, and everything beautiful about it. And I still have no idea why I took the picture, let alone why I enlarged it and kept it on my wall all these years.