Winter Painted Green
The German poet Heinrich Heine was quoted in the nineteenth century, “Our summer is just a winter painted green, even the sun has to wear a flannel jacket with us if it doesn’t want to catch a cold.”
I’ve been wearing an old moth-eaten Army-Navy sweater for months waiting for Spring to arrive. This is a continuation of my last story, Build Back Better, if you want to survive. It has been the first time I spent the whole winter in Bavaria due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I survived along with the black swans and the white swans. The black swans were taken to their comfortable warm-house but their release was delayed due to a quarantine imposed by a bird flu. I am still waiting for spring to arrive.
April and May have been designated as the coldest months since 1938. Christl and I, along with the other bird-watchers, felt sorry for the white swan family, especially the mother swan. She has been sitting on three, four, or five eggs (bird-watchers can not agree) keeping them warm throughout this cold spell. From March 20th or thereabouts until May 14, 2021 she has been sitting non-stop in the nest patiently. That is six days above the white (mute) swan average hatching period. Finally, mother and father swan celebrated three little cygnets. The mystery of how many eggs there were (or survived) was solved.
We take the Rott river walk (4.3 Kilometers) at least twice a week for the exercise and to check on the white swan family. We also check on the black swans in the Chestnut Tree Ring walk (1.4 Kilometers) that circles the village and their moat daily, when they are not in their warm-house. This is our exercise when we are not bicycling over the winter months.
Christl and I only hope that we can celebrate Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” on January 21st in the year 2022. That would mark the second year in a row we were able to celebrate the 226th opening of Swan Lake in St. Petersburg, Russia, with the swan family.
