THE TRUTH About the Last Post ---

--- which you all must read for this one to make sense. Just for the record, that was of course a real place, and it is pretty much as I described it, except for the taste and effects of the water, which, rest assured, I did not actually drink.

The actual legend says that there was once a convent here --- hence, "The Well of the Nuns", or Nonnenbrunnen --- and once every hundred years the convent rises again out of the earth and ghostly organ music can be heard. (Nothing to do with the water.) Anyone who hears this music falls into a deep sleep. Nothing about what happens next.

As near as I could tell from the information plaques, there never actually was a convent here, but there are the ruins of a Roman villa, dating from Imperial times. The info says the villa was built in the year 130 CE, and it lay undiscovered until 1970, after which it was excavated. It is inconceivable to me that this building, even in ruins, even buried beneath the earth, could have been here for nearly 2,000 years without someone knowing it was there. Not in an area that has been constantly inhabited for even longer than that. So I figure that there was some memory among the people that there was once a building here, and as they forgot what the building actually was, they made up a story about a convent. Interesting that what they came up with was a domicile of women devoted to the sacred.

There is nothing left of the Roman villa except the foundation. Most of it seems to have been made of wood, and the info plaque said it was burned down by German tribes, perhaps in the 4th century.

The stonework above the spring as well as the woodwork above the well have been renovated and/or restored several times over their history.

The name of the village that lies nestled between the Neckar and the hills is Neckargemuend. There are actually quite a number of such villages, but this is the one with the Nonnenbrunnen a few kilometers in the hills above it. The one I had to walk through to get there. And, yes, there was a Fasching parade there, unbeknownst to me, that afternoon while I was walking in the hills. The evidence of it was unmistakable. The 'remnants of fireworks' I referred to were actually those little cardboard bottle-shaped things; you pull a string and they explode (but not really). Poppers, I think they are called.

My little excursion actually took place on Saturday --- three days after Valentine's Day and, coincidentally, three days before the actual day of Fasching. Aka Mardi Gras. But people were partying all weekend. I never knew they made such a big deal of it here. In Mannheim on Tuesday they closed the main street to have a big street festival. (The parade in Mannheim had been on Sunday.) But it was all over with by midnight.

I realize the term "dancing people" may seem like a strange image to describe the Germans these days. There are several layers to that metaphor. My little story went in a different direction than I had in mind when I started. The young people here, at any rate, still like to dance. And one must admit, the resilience of these people is remarkable. Charles Bukowski writes about the church bells in Mannheim, "These people have lost two major wars in thirty years, and still the bells ring."

And 2,000 years ago, they would have danced.

What else is true in what I wrote, you all must decide.