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.
