harvest time

A sad note I must say was the result of a call I received on Wednesday morning from a funeral director in Bayreuth asking me if I could sing some gospel music for a funeral. I replied in the affirmative and was told the funeral was for a young man of 20 who had committed suicide on September 7th which coincidentally was the date my grandson Samuel was born. The service took place at a small and beautiful cemetery in the town of Weidenberg near Bayreuth in the Fichtelgebirge mountains. Here is a picture of the entrance to the cemetery and a picture of the surrounding countryside













Yesterday I went into the garden and armed with my new aluminum ladder scaling the heights of my venerable plum tree to receive the benefits of the fruits of my labor so to speak..The plums are a small variety in Germany called "Zwetschgen" and are purple in color with a sweet taste. The tree has suffered not only from age but from an idiot neighbor who put his still smoldering grill into his tool house near my tree which hangs a bit over to his side. The fire dept. put the flames out but not before half of the tree was burned and all the plums were ruined. I pruned the tree of the dead branches and it came back to life the next year. This year we had strong winds which further pruned the tree as nature is wont to do. The broken off branches luckily still had bunches of fruit which ripened in spite of the lack of sap from the mother trunk...I now have to figure out what to do with over 25 pounds of fruit.