Frauenberg

In the spring of 1967, a group of us Americans studying at the Phillips Unversitaet in Marburg Germany packed up a lunch of hard rolls, salami, cheese and a bottle of South Tyrolean red wine and took ourselves out along the road, out of town to a small rise in the floor of the Lahn River valley, a place called “Frauenberg.”
After a long, never ending German winter, days of incessant drizzle and darkness, it is easy to see why the Germans in the spring would take to the woods and fields in droves. “Wanderlust” is not a German word for nothing. And unlike the coast of Maine, Germany had a real spring: days when the weather was clear as crystal; the air warm and gentle but not hot; the grass the deepest green, like the fields of Ireland.
The Frauenberg, lady’s mountain, or more probably Mountain of Our Lady, was topped by the stone ruins of a medieval cloister, only the remnants of a stone turret. Around and within were lilacs or some bush of similar type, their buds at the bursting point.
We sat on the grass, opened our bag and brought out the food we had brought with us. One of us, probably me, had a jackknife with which to slice the cheese and salami, while my roommate had carried along a corkscrew and a pair of glasses, which we would share, having been close friends for nearly a year, sharing everything from teabags to germs.
We sat and ate, licking the grease from the salami from our lips and fingers, passing the glasses around to swallow down the bread.
Above the sky was an indescribable, rich blue; the grass below an equally lush green. Birds rode in circles on the thermals rising from the ground. Down the valley, far off in the distance were dots where villages and now and then a tractor in the fields were. They sky and the grass became hazy in the distance until they blended into one on the horizon.
It has been 42 years since that day, and it has never left my memory.