Contrary to the winter and soon, we go already to want to we retire with giant strides after done daily work into the homely warm room to still spend a couple of little whiles at a cosy idleness before going to bed again. Then it was also at home if we rubbed our back pleasantly at the edge of the tiled stove spitting warmth or sat quietly in a corner of the kitchen-cum-living-room and watched the leisurely flickery embers in the stove in the long winter evenings. We always had much time there to think about the last day or to hatch plans already for the coming one again.
I won't so as if he spoke inaudibly a long, hearty prayer, forget the picture of the grandfather, the old farmer, time of my life as he sat in his worry chair thick besides the tiled stove, swept with all his senses into himself, being silent in such evenings for hours, the hands over his age rounded belly gefalten. Was it hours of deeply felt thanks for a work rich, fulfilled life which granted the leisure these well-deserved hours for him now? Provides his house directional, his children, his journey through life had closed behind him so. He had only had the memory left but one could fill the old age and this didn't weigh less than all the efforts and successes of a work rich life with that.
But we leave the grandfather in his settlement room and we turn to that part of the life which didn't take place next to the stove being warm in the wintry evenings. We make a step to outside in the balmy summer's evening if the day's work carried out, the cattle in his stables provided and the supper was taken. Life came to the lane bank in front of the house onto the street there where the most important news was exchanged and the latest news passed on now. It rested and talked himself good at the bank in front of the house under the acacias or mulberry tree, because the road was blown up and the air clean. The departing day, so long, still remained unchanged in front of the breaking dusk, we were allowed to see the round dance of the untiring swallows in her fight against the gnat plague. One of these hard-working birdies here and there sat down on the the ball of the electrical line to rest, like us, a little and unszu say hello.
It was usually the older people who whiled away the time with various chats at the lane bank. The younger had gone out because waited someplace. a rendezvous on her. But, if the old slept already, lane bank swept her on the empty been now back, sometime at a later hour, too, the luck of the young years in cosy togetherness sat down there down, cuddled and enjoyed quite narrowly to each other. Which money-making would have learned the message stock exchange could have told the lane bank! We still carry the native country into us in our hearts as a pain let at the lane bank someplace. And we look into a fog landscape if we look for her in our memory. We thought to have found what for the eternity at that time, has passing away been already soon after ours an on call stationary happy time.
Always if our thoughts hurry in the past, we meet those colors glad pictures of an eventful nature as she is able to design feeling only spiritually so hearty. In the change of the seasons we took at home many impressions from lasting beauty into us which determine our thinking and feeling after the loss of that peaceful, native world today certainly, too. Experienced youthfully and marked spiritually cannot be replaced always any more. You follow me, dear compatriots, ' walk through the native seasons on mine! The last snow had hardly melted, the first flowers stretched cheekily her brains out into mother garden there. It started with a flourishing wastefully, was humming hard-working bees of the sweet smell of innumerable shiners flattered and of the tireless sung of. Was there at all an Easter on which the green meadow wasn't strewed by a sea of colored little Blums? I feel in my soft child little hands the luxuriant, sap green tufts of grass certainly today which I picked on the meadow and put in my little basket so that the Easter bunny didn't need to be hungry. The sun was so high in the sky already soon in the year that her beams fell almost vertically to the earth.It came the time at which moved out of the reapers onto the fields to catch up with the harvest. This was certainly hard work which lasted from the first sunbeam to in into the dusk in the morning. Picture defy all tribulation, also this the memory seems transfigured to us lovably today only certainly, one knows anyway that it was necessary to fill the chambers with the daily bread. Who of ours wouldn't find the singing of the threshing machine the song of glad creating as the hymn of our beneficial work then? If the work rested for a while, one liked himself to allow a refreshing bath on the beach at this weekend. Already on the way there still before one entered the bathing area one could smell his water and his splash, mixes with the sound more merrily children's voices hear? It was fresh water alone which let the visit of the beach become an experience but not this; one also liked to sit on the shady terrace, orchestra which elicited enchanting melodies from his string instruments consumed his ice or drank his lemonade and listened to it dreamily there. The corn fields were hardly reaped, new enthusiasm already started there; the vintage started. Cars with big barrels rumbled, out to the vineyards and nobody wanted to be missing through the lanes, if it was necessary to fill the juicy grapes into the barrels, to squeeze out at home and to convert to a sweet fruit juice her. From him became finally the substance which helped give this one to winter evenings in the string to give cheerfulness. We finish our short walk with a sledge ride over the wide country through the seasons. Wrapped up we let be ourselves dragged by the wintry landscape, getting the schnapps bottle out from case to case, into the fur cape being warm of two horses to support the process of on being warm effectively. We felt, as it we pleasantly by body and soul trickled and as new strengths and new plans into us purchased, already the look the coming one turned towards the new year which in turn should become a year of divine blessing in a native security.
We already wait for the approaching spring for the most beautiful season as one uses to say. Something must have his turn at this assertion. Aren't you also like me? Always if I think of Sekitsch and stroll in thought through his lanes is spring. Then always seem the sun. Nature has woken up from her sleep and sets the new season the delicate green for the triumphal march toward the departing, icy winter on. The first buds start in the gardens to sprout and open on the trees. The nature again woken up will be covered by a colored flower sea soon, beetles will crowd over young grasses and in the airs butterflies will flutter, a beautiful than the other one. Precisely at this moment my thoughts reach the dear hometown and go on travels through the familiar world of a filled youth. Wouldn't you like to walk with me?
We have come by train and get out at the station. The bus we could get on already stands there, too. But because we have time, we want to cover the way to the village on foot.
On the right and on the left the way we see cultivated countries. Wide open fields will be covered of canary yellow wheat soon. And replete green corn stems will rise to the sky still later. We here and there see a crouching summer arbor surrounded by vines fruit-trees occasionally jut out of. And over everything hard-working swallows draw her trains by the airs. You are on the hunt for food, this one himself offers the native sun bill glistening in this for them in the abundance.
We have already approached the village so far now that we recognize the outlines of the first houses. And even the church steeple juts out over the pointed gables. We hear how further his bell heralds definitely the full hour and this sound swings on the last part to the place middle into us.
We stand now in front of the place of worship there. It is even more beautiful, even more raised than we have ever known it in our thoughts. The angel glitters with the trombone on the roof of the pulpit in the most beautiful gold inside. We listen with rapt attention to the game of the organ whose sound flattered solemnly and raised in humble admiration us at many causes once. " eye God " over the altar and then we discover this and be frightened because tears which are as red as blood escape from him. A presentiment until the sad end of our beautiful church?
We leave the place of worship and go further, through the main lane and the Pomeranian, up up to the tree garden. The juicy shoots whose sweet fruit much zest for life donates so infinitely hollowly and on the left grow above on the right this one behind the invalid town. We see from above how are into the hectare frosts' hard-working people at work and hear the even operation cycle of the hemp breakers out of the nearby hemp factory we.
We then move on, the dig along, at the mill past, up to the windmill. Your wings turn silently and throw restless shade on the earth. We are tempted like lively children over these shadows hinwegzuhüpfen but we cannot speak all too long stay. The beach lures with his refreshing water. We rush, a couple of rounds swim and drink then a cool lemonade on the shady terrace in.
It becomes evening and we continue our walk. So we reach the old cemetery soon. It moves up us. Behind the gate the ancestor monument greets us and behind this the earth hills sunk in which cover our settler ancestors spread. Into prayers we stop in front of them, fold our hands and pray quietly. And then our lips whisper: "We are here because we cannot forget you. And you always will stay with us, we promise this!"
We drive the way back to the station with the bus because we have got tired on our walk. The hard benches of the vehicle keep us up. You push a little but the farewell is also painful. When our train gets into movement, we wave to the native country sinking in the distance. But it isn't a farewell for ever again and again in our thought because we come back.
I was recently asked by a native what has been so beautiful at our former native country, then that we cannot forget her.
Confessed honestly I remained guiltily the answer not because I wouldn't know this but therefore because I immediately felt which extent with which I would have had to answer the question got alive at feelings in me. And this didn't go in a short sentence.
I didn't come to the quiet since then any more and have asked me the question again and again myself: What was so beautiful at our native country? The test is worthwhile, I think that way to respond to it.
We lived at home on an "island". Most of our people have seldom, many even never left the hometown. This may appear as overdue so to speak in our time of today particularly since we were cut largely off the development by it more or less anyway outside the area of life of our own. We so what spurt into us, something like an irresistible desire for that hectic development, then, how she every single day takes hold of ours with all her unpleasant consequences today? Wasn't it much nicer to be allowed to experience the security in our village community daily where everybody practically knew everybody while we know not even the name of our neighbor today in many cases certainly? One helped each other out if need was at the man and sealed a done deal with a handshake in the justifiable confidence that the debtor will realize his obligation while, today, a notarial contract doesn't even offer a sure liability for it more yet. How was it calming to know anyway that one wasn't left alone if one was into need if one might weiterwohnen and weiterleben as an old person in the settlement with the children instead of being pushed away into the anonymity to an old people's home? We didn't need laws in which parents and child duties were regulated because the knowledge came from the education and therefore from the heart around what is a human duty. Our marriages and families, the only natural basis of a healthy community life, were put so tightly that there were hardly divorces. Everybody just knew that a human connection doesn't only consist taking but primarily giving.
We learned already to handle the joys of the life as children modestly and undemandingly. How pleased about every apple or about a slab of chocolate which the godfather did to us into the basket at Easter or Christmas were we? And, if we got really another box of building blocks or a soccer given as a birthday present, the joy was twice great. We didn't look for the doubtful diversion in one lightly either and lärmüber-flooded narrow room in which the senses are overworked and damaged up to the late night. We got our pleasure from game and sports outside in the free nature.
And there outside the first sleep robbing senses of later durable community among man and woman also germinated under fragrant acacia flowers or in the tasty smell of a stubble-field. Our community grew on the bottom of a natural world and not between foul-smelling solid lines of cars which allow themselves no more quiet and also steal the last rest of tranquillity. And this community is lasting except for today.
Primarily younger people who haven't experienced our native country like to be inclined to smile at our civilization then pityingly and to understand her as our culture falsely from time to time. We had certainly to fetch our water at the fountain because we didn't have any water pipes. But is tapwater healthier, then, as our artesian water it was? And on this it comes at and not on this anyway, where one has it from. We had to go also over the court if the most human of all needs arrived for us. But the hygiene has therefore been lower in our apartments? There wasn't any television, no computers and hardly cars. And nevertheless we were informed, learned to calculate and accomplished every goal on foot if not so anyway with the horse-buggy. We played instruments and sang our songs whose text everybody still understood. We talked in the mother tongue and not into at all imported lingo for one from which more anyway speaks than after communication the reprehensible need for a lying intellect. We didn't like over-estimation of the abilities garnished with covered arrogance. We all the more consciously paused modestly in the narrow bonds of our national traditions, however, and lived so less a deceitful civilization as an unadulterated, clean culture. And just therefore wants to seem to us how the civilization escalates as if this culture was stunted in the same measure today.
Our native country was an intellectual experience. Your picture which we joyfully bear in the heart always is experiencing been allowed to drawn of the youthful. This picture cannot be indicated with today's scales. The stamp of quality of her beauty further lives satisfaction, security and luck in the ideas then in the norms for modesty. To this neither the technical development nor the in many places ascertainable judging fall is able for something to change in our time of today. Moral concepts of civilization are subject to a steady change. What unchanged continues to exist is the intellectual content of our existence. To this nothing still has changed. And therefore we feel our native country so nicely that we cannot forget her.