There lives an Angel in a RoomOfHerOwn, and sometimes when she is overwhelmed with summertime sadness she sends me a photography asking my opinion. This one is the Indian summer (in German called Altweibersommer, literally meaning “old ladies summer”), as it appeared last week on our institutes campus.
Recognizing some of the slow changes that affect the people or the nature around us suddenly makes me aware of the cruel and merciless passing of time. I see it every year in the middle of the summer, when the cereals on the farmlands around our village grow high, the wheat, barley and rye turns golden and produces a rich and delicious smell (I imagine that such must be the odor of the sun), and then suddenly on one afternoon, the farmers start their giant harvesting machines and cut all the golden fields down. And suddenly, the rich grains that were swollen over the last month like a womans womb during pregnancy and that beared the promise of a whole year with sufficient bread and cakes and pasta (and beer from the barley and malt), all these magnificent signs of a wealthy future are gone. Instead of the golden, majestic grains that slowly move in the summer wind, only the short cut trunks are left on the fields, but they are the dead remnants of the majestic plants, and they will stay like this for the whole winter. Therefore, already now in the mid of July, I begin to fear the season of snow and frost and chilly wind, because from one day to the other, the golden grains turn from a symbol of rich and powerful life into the first prophecy of the end of all life.
Since we moved from the center of Munich to the rural area on the cities periphery, I fear this moment in the middle of summer every year again and again. You see, how cruel the living close to the nature can be.
