The youngest of our Family

As I posted after the weekend, we saw my niece and her husband (the invisible person in the striped shirt) and welcomed young Bente. My brother has four children, and he is a granddad of four, soon they will be five. Three of his children don't live with him, only the youngest one does.
The young mother and her family live in my brother's house in the village I showed before, in an old farmhouse, built about 150 years ago. My brother does all the renovation work in it. He also does the gardening. My sister-in-law is a teacher. It takes us about an hour to get there, so unfortunately we don't meet often enough.

Eyendorf, a village south of Hamburg

Here are few pictures I took on the walk on Saturday morning. The light was dim, but the rain had ended. The night before, we had walked from our guest room to the wedding party in heavy rain and storm. It was just a few hundred yards away, but we got there all wet.

The village Eyendorf, as I mentioned, is more than 900 years old. The name may have to do with the German word for oak, Eiche.
The inscription on the house front is from 1837. It says: "Rebuilt after the raging fire. We will from now on again praise the Lord in gratitude."
On our way, I took pictures of a tree battle, a hawthorne smashed an elder tree in a long fight. To me, the elder is a magic tree -- or shrub, very often it does not reach tree size. Its wood is brittle and looks like imploded under the violence of the hawthorn. A slow war between plants. Hm.

A Rural Wedding

On Friday, my brother's youngest daughter got married. We went to the village, where they live, a half-hour drive south of Hamburg's borders, a beautiful place with old farmhouses and many oaks. The village is 934 years old.

All my brother's grown up children were there, his grandkids, too.

Here, you see the coach game. It is led by the bride's brother with the cylinder, performing the coachman.

The bride and groom are wearing crowns because they are king and queen. This is a lot of fun. The coach consists of king and queen, coachman, horses, and wheels. The story is read aloud, and the mentioned persons or parts of the coach have to jump up and run around the chair, each time they are mentioned in the text. Which makes the coach ride a real strenuous action.

In another game, everyone had to wear a paper cap, paper plate ears, and bunny teeth and sing a song. Playing silly games seems to be part of weddings in this country (I'm not so familiar with wedding customs here). We spent the night in a guest room near the place -- just a little walk home -- and on Saturday, we had breakfast in my brother's house. I took a picture of the old cobblestones in front of his house. For Wanda and all who like it!

My brother has done a lot of renovation work in this house, like clay plaster work, painting walls with natural paint, gardening and laying tiles.









This was my gift for the couple -- beside our main present.