They're whaling again in Iceland...

...and that totally pisses me off.
Sorry for the choice of words, but I really don't understand why any nation would allow for whales to be hunted ever again, instead of promoting whale-watching tours instead.
Why kill the animals, when there are so few left? What will they do in a few years, when their prey will be extinct? Why not just change the attitude and let many people pay for the joy to see those big mammals swim near them, year for year? Wouldn't that be much better for all parties concerned, whales, whalers and tourists?

*sigh*

I cancelled my plans to go to Iceland next year. I'll visit Scotland instead.
You know, I would really have loved to go to Iceland...

Not a Haiku

Lying awake

What is it
that keeps me awake,
turning in my bed,
tho I feel tired when I get up.

The night is yet so long.

Per aspera...

Lately
I came to recognize
that what I had considered a blessing:
to find the good in the bad,
to find the beauty in small things,
could be
a curse.

Lately
I came to recognize
that this ability
to think positive,
to use my phantasy,
could bar me from seing
that there are things
and persons
who bother, anger, agonize
and paralyze me.
That they keep me
from being what I am
and what I want.

Just lately
I came to recognize
how important it is
to search
and find
my self.

A product of circumstances

My great-grandmother was 93 years old when she died.

Every morning, she would get up at 07:00, have breakfast, sit at the window, knitting dark grey stockings, watching the world outside. She would have had lunch at some time before 12:00, have a nap on her kitchen sofa, flip through a magazine and sit beside the window again. As she found it hard to walk (she had gained some weight), she didn’t go downstairs in her late years. She had dinner at 18:00 and watched TV until she switched it off at 20:00 to retire to bed (no matter what program she had been watching); to argue the next morning that she hadn’t slept well in the night.

She would never have overstepped a radius of, say 50 km, maybe even less, from the place where she was born.

She lived a regular life. A uniformly continuous life.

Although sometimes I wish that my life was a little calmer or more quiet, I would never want to have a life like hers. I know I never will. I daresay that it is impossible today to live like that.

It’s funny: She is already quite old in my first memories of her. But then again, who isn’t, in the thoughts of a small child? She seemed so old, so strange somehow, so far away, almost like a (sorry!!!) dinosaur. Her lifestyle and mine are worlds apart.

Even though, when I look at her picture, I can see a young woman who has so much potential about her. But it wasn’t meant to be used in her times.
She adapted to society, to circumstances, and by the time she had reached my current age, she wore black or dark grey dresses and apron dresses over that (except for anniversaries, when she wore a dark blue dress and no apron) and a bun (chignon) at the back of her head.

She had given birth to two girls and that was all that life had provided for her, it seems. And in this state, she remained for more than 50 years.
Maybe she was happy with that, I don’t know.
I wouldn’t. But then again, my life started differently, it developed differently, and the decades that lie between our lives provided more freedom for anyone. Freedom to think, freedom for our heart’s desires, and the chance to make it come true. So, she and me, and anyone, we are products of the circumstances we live in.

Somehow, I feel a bond to her. It’s a loose bond, nothing like that one I feel for my grandmother who is 95 years old now, but a bond anyway.

And I ask myself: Do I use all the potential I’ve got?
Do I make the best of my life?
I don’t think so...

At the market

We've been at the Hanau farmer's market today. All the fruits and vegetables look so yummy!
When we stepped between the first few market stands, the sun came out and shone through some cyclamen...

The flowers glowing in the sunlight! Wonderful. I wanted to take a picture of that, but had to wait several minutes for the sun to come back out again from the clouds behind which it had hidden.

Ah, these wonderful crops! Cauliflower, cabbage, little red and big white raddish, carrots...

...all glowing with the sun captured during the last weeks and months.

And I simply love the many shapes and colours pumpkins can have!

Summer's End

Last Saturday, we harvested our little garden.

We had 2 peas and 5 apples (2 are still left, 3 went straight into an apple pie...).

And some buckets of red grapes which we immediately strained to gain 6 litres of fine sweet red juice.
I put aside some juice for jelly, then we added some freezed-dried yeast and sugar to the remaining, and it began to bubble its way to a homemade wine in our cellar (ha, ha: okay, in the basement, near the central-heating boiler) on the same evening.

Then we remembered that we hadn't even siphoned last year's wine to smaller bottles. In fact, the water-filled plug that should keep fruit-flies etc. away, had run dry and I expected to find vinegar instead of wine...
But we were lucky - and very surprised, because it turned out that the wine had developed wonderfully, producing the smell and taste of an old white port wine :-)

And I just had to throw away the remnants of another late summer's greeting yesterday: This year's last two roses. I discovered them behind a bush, were they would have withered unwitnessed. I really cherished those blossoms; even the buds opened!