It went very quickly, falling in love with mountain farming. And it was like that always is with the best things in life: not planned.
In spring 2013 my friend Kathrin and I donated a few days of vacation to Bergbauernhilfe Südtirol and exchanged our office for a stable. I was looking for a way to spend a lot of time in one piece in the mountains, much longer than usual in hiking holidays or mountaineering. It was already clear to me that I was the mountain type and not the sea type. Even when I lived for two years in Hamburg with the Baltic and North Seas practically on my doorstep, I wasn't at Timmendorfer Strand or in Sankt Peter-Ording.
I had two options in mind: I could either go to an alp for a season and change from milking to crap to a farmer's wife, or I could hire in a mountain hut, a kind of alpine club hut. With the excursion to the mountain farm in South Tyrol I wanted to test option A, whereby the mountain farm was not an alp, but at least a farm and at least in the mountains. How was I supposed to know if I was even made for farming? I had already seen many mountain huts from the inside on my tours. But a farm, let alone an alp, never has. Maybe getting up early would annoy me. Maybe I'd get tired, literally, of cleaning up. Maybe I'd be wondering what cow had ridden me.
Kathrin and I landed on a mountain farm at 1,430 metres just below Plose, an organic farm with goats, chickens and a donkey.
"You come from Frankfurt and Cologne," Bauer Arnold greeted us when he picked us up at the train station in Brixen."And now you're coming to us," he thought out loud.
"Yes, and we can get to it," we tried to convince Arnold on the way up. Half an hour up the mountain we had time to take turns poking questions at it and providing evidence of our drive.
"I hope we can make hay this week, now that I have two helpers," Arnold told us."But probably the weather won't play along. Then we'll go into the wood!"
That was our cue. We two native Siegerland women absorbed the timber industry with their mother's milk. Well, we rarely liked 35 metre high mountain spruces - neither Kathrin, when she helped her father to make firewood, nor I, when I was there, when Dad and my brothers killed little spruces to build a bridge over the pond on our property. But we could tell of the Haubergswirtschaft, the centuries-old cyclical forest management principle from our homeland. After all.
Just arrived at the farm, we started. Grandpa took the scythe out of the shed to mow all around the house.
"I can do that," I shouted to him, overzealously.
"Can you handle the scythe?" he wanted to know.
"Yes, I know that from home," I replied, trying to make a good impression.
But frankly, I'd never mowed with a scythe before. Not even with a lawnmower. I never actually mowed anything before. Together, yeah, loaded and taken away, that sort of thing. Handyman's work. But mowed? Out of fear for the frogs and certainly also for me, Daddy, who hates lawn mowers as a matter of principle and who puts his life on the good old scythe, never let me get involved. Well, the story is quickly told. Every few meters a fence post stood in my way and the power steering of the scythe was somehow broken. I failed miserably. Wordlessly, my grandfather took the scythe from me, and the grass was mown faster than Kathrin and I could see. Then we scraped it together into piles.
Then we went milking.
"As a child I was often on holiday on a nearby farm here," Kathrin Arnold and I told Arnold, while Arnold showed us the goat stable.
"Did you also milk back then?" our boss wanted to know.
"Sure," Kathrin said,"it's just been a few years."
I'd rather not say anything, because I'd never milked anything either. We listened attentively when Arnold explained to us how his stable worked. There were two areas: the large playpen for the dairy goats and the kindergarten for the offspring. 24
