Even though we live in what I refer to as a “suburb” of Munich and the population is many times greater than that of the rural Iowa town that I grew up in, our “suburb” was historically an independent village with a lot of farms that survive even today.
As I have mentioned before, I am no stranger to farms. I grew up in Iowa and most of the people my hometown were either farmers or had family that were farmers. For those of you that do not know, Midwestern farms are big… really BIG. Many cover hundreds, if not thousands, of acres of land with the farm houses and buildings set in the middle of these expanses. Because of this, if you live on a Midwestern farm it is not unheard of that your closest neighbor lives more than a mile away and it takes you 20 minutes to drive into “town.”
German farms, on the other hand, don’t necessarily reside outside of the town-proper. The farm’s house and other buildings are often inside the city limits and the farmers “commute” to the land outside of town. In fact, in little villages like ours, it is not unheard of for farms to be smack-dab in the middle of town.
As a matter of fact, even though we live on what can only be described as our little village’s Main Street, directly next door to our apartment building is a fully-functional farm. This farm is jokingly referred to as “Old Mc Donald’s Farm” by A. and me. I am not exactly sure where the land that Old Mc Donald farms is, but I have seen him driving his tractor down Main Street on numerous occasions on his way to plow, plant, or harvest.
And like most farmers, Old Mc Donald doesn’t just work the land: He also has livestock in the form of at least one dairy cow and a handful of mixed fowl. I am familiar with this barnyard menagerie because it is nearly impossible to ignore them when the chickens crawl under the rickety fence and start wandering around the parking lot below my balcony, when old Bossy starts mooing because her udders are full and she needs milked, or when the rooster starts crowing at the break of day and doesn’t let up until the sun sets.
In all honesty I don’t really mind seeing the chickens or hearing the cow on occasion. In fact, A. likes to tease me that all of the noise should make me feel right at home… never mind that I never lived on a “proper” farm in Iowa.
However, I will admit that the damned rooster does tend to get on my nerves! I thought that roosters crowed at daybreak and that was it. I didn’t know that if left to his own devices, a rooster will crow any time of the day or night that he feels like and often he will crow for minutes on end. But after three and a half years of living next door to Old Mc Donald, I have finally gotten used to the rooster and his crows are no longer anything more than background noise.
Then yesterday it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard a peep out of the rooster for a few days. I thought maybe Old Mc Donald had finally gotten tired of listening to him and convinced his wife to make fried chicken for dinner.
However, when I mentioned to A. that I hadn’t heard the rooster for a few days, he remarked that while it was possible that Old Mc Donald had finally eaten the rooster; it was more likely that he had been shut up in the chicken coop.
It was then that I remembered that as of last week all domesticated birds are no longer allowed to be free-running in Bavaria as a precautionary measure against the bird flu.
