I stand in front of the mirror and pluck drowsy gray hair

I was dreaming, last night?

From the eerie house down on the embankment, gives, where the road makes a sharp curve, bent into the rock. A rugged one, sunless sight, like the old one, ancient woman, who lived in the house, in the morning in the dark a car behind him pulled over the tracks, two large metal vats on it, disappeared at the side entrance of the Löwen tavern on the other side of the embankment, rugged and twisted ....

We children never knew, whether the old woman with the leftovers, who left the restaurant to her, fed their sows or at least fed themselves …

Did not venture into her careworn, to see furrowed and yet somehow inhuman looking face, when she walked past us in the opposite direction towards her hunched house, That a ray of sun never reached. Contained with serious secrets from the turn of the century (she was well 1890 born), dressed in a black coat, heavy slippers and kicking on the side when walking, we understandably thought her a little bit a witch …

But now think of the blue layered terrace houses with the huge concrete garages, who stand there now, and I think: what radiated from her and so fascinated us, was just the ghostly mask of ongoing oblivion ... the ancient woman was probably no longer alive in anyone's memory .... !!!

Once we did something unheard of. We got off our way to school and ambushed the haunted house, sneaked through the tenn to the attic. Tock-Tock ... made it closer ... once further ... but then closer and closer ….! Tock-Tock!

This moment, in which we realized, that we were trapped, she would catch us .... and a streak of barely visible afternoon light reached in vain through the cracks of the Gadens: he never passed …. Perhaps he was the moment, In which we survived our childhood for the first time.

Breathless with shock and tension, we hid in the hay.

And now I'll soon be old and gray.

(9.8.19)