Saxon Life

We had few forms of entertainment in the modern sense. No book stores, magazine stands, television. It is true that there was a telephone in the local pub but it was the only one around for kilometers. Shopping was very limited. There was a local store but the merchandise was basically limited to things like sugar, salt, flour, mason jars, sausage casings

Commercially prepared foods and off the rack clothing were unheard of. If you wanted to eat cherries out of season, you would have had to put them up yourself while they were on the trees. Clothing was made by the women, or, for something special, custom made by the taylor.

There was a great reverence for storks. Everyone would stop what they were doing to watch a flight of storks passing overhead. Like all the other children, when my mother was expecting the birth of my brother, I dutifully put cookies on the windowsill to encourage the stork to come. When a stork elected a neighbor's chimney to build a nest on, he felt so honored, that he built himself a new chimney rather than chasing the stork off his old one.

Hay was cut by hand using a scythe and left to dry. When dry, a horse drawn gadget was used to gather it in furrows. Then we would arrive with pichforks and the horsedrawn haywagon and pitch the hay into the wagon (yes, children would do this also). Someone would remain in the wagon to distribute and hay and pack it so that the wagon would hold the maximum amount of hay possible. Pretty soon the hay would reach a level where the smaller children could no longer reach the top of the hay. I would then sometimes take the reins from the adult and take over control of the wagon. I still remember how to command a horse in the Saxon language. Hay balers were unheard of

Hay was stored in the hayloft of the barns. One of the forms of entertainment we children indulged in was to climb up to the rafters in the barn and to let ourselves drop into the loose hay. We never seemed to tire of this.

School vacations were geared to the needs of a farming community. One of the vacation periods was popularly referred to as potato harvest vacation. Potatoes were harvested by hand, using special pitchforks with metal balls on the ends of the tines so that they would pass around the potatoes rather than piercing them and thus spoiling them. I don't think I have ever been so exhausted as I was after harvesting potatoes for a whole day.Towards the end of the day, we would gather up the dried potato vines and make a huge bonfire. We would toss potatoes into the fire to cook. The outside of the potatoes would be charred but we were so ravenously hungry from the hard work that they seemed like the most sensationally tasty food that we had ever had.

The local fuel of choice was peat. People would travel to the local peat bog, dig out bricks of peat and stack them to drain and dry. In the Fall they would hitch a horse to the wagon and bring home fuel for the winter. Walking on a peat bog is a strange sensation. It is like walking on an unusually solid pudding.

I was told that before the war, many Polish laborers came to work on the farms. They were called Saxengaenger (those who walk to the Saxons). They became quite fluent in the Saxon language (but not in German, which was not spoken in these parts). They would come back to work year after year until they had saved up enough money to buy their own farms in Poland. Interestingly enough, when many Silesian refugees from the allied sponsored ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe were settled among us, the locals thought of them as being Polish. Kind of ironic since they were driven out of their ancestral homes for the crime of being German.

In most of Europe, farmers live in villages and travel to work their outlying fields. Not so in the Saxonland. Here people lived in isolated farmsteads, separated from other farmhouses by forests and fields. One of my friends lived some distance from me. I would walk along a dirt road through a section of forest. Along the way was a thatch roofed farmhouse inhabited by a strange old woman. Her hair was in pigtails nearly reaching the ground. The pigtails were encased in cloth sheaths. It was said that she had never cut her hair in her life.

It gets dark early in the Winter in those northern latitudes and as it gets dark, a wind would pick up making the ancient timbers of the farmhouse creak. This would creep us kids out after a while and we would move to the living room where my friend's grandmother would seem to perpetually sit at the spinning wheel. We would ask her to tell us a story, and what vivid stories they were. She was the most gifted storyteller I have ever heard. Her words could make you feel the cold, the wind blowing through your hair, hunger, fear, elation. Stories about Thor and Freya, the tricks that Loki played, the dwarves. The stories, of course, were told in the Saxon language, as she spoke no German. It is a pity that no one ever recorded her stories. I don't know how much she made up and how much were traditional stories.

In connection with dwarves, there was a local wood that no one ever entered. Not even to gather firewood or mushrooms. It was supposed to be a haunt of the dwarves.
Little skeptic that I was, I entered the wood one day to explore. Instantly I was swallowed up by a gloom and silence. The canopy of the huge trees completely closed overhead. This was a virgin forest that had never been cut. The air was damp and moss grew high up the trunks of the trees. The floor had the spongy feel of ages of leaf litter. Suddenly I felt a prickling in the back of my neck. I turned around and I saw a little man with a full beard standing there, looking at me. This was very peculiar because I had never seen a man with a beard before, much less an adult who was very short. I changed directions but so did he, following me and getting closer and closer. In a burst of panic, I ran out of the wood as fast as I could never to return.

The elderberry bush had a special place in people's regard. In ancient days, it was believed that the goddess who protected the household, mother Holle, lived in the bush. I don't know if anyone still believed this but the fact is that every farmhouse had an elderberry bush near it and no one would dream of molesting an elderberry bush. Mother Holle was also believed to live up in the sky and when she shook her featherbeds out the window, the escaping feathers fell to earth as snow. Once, when it was starting to rain a friend wryly observed that Mother Holle must be pissing. As young children, we sang a song about dancing around the Hollebush.