Appalachia Year

On my run today I noticed this weed flower, muscling its way into view from behind telephone poles and mailboxes so that half the street was dusted yellow.

It reminded me that it was almost exactly three whole years ago that I spent an important weekend in Freiburg, Germany. It was sometime after the friendliest dive bar served midnight spaghetti. It was probably after we were led to the secret dance party in the warehouse basement. At some point these pink-cheeked boys speaking fast, drunk German approached us as we tread carefully around the tiny canals that vein the city (we learned earlier that day that if you step in a Bächle you have to marry a man from Freiburg) and presented the three of us with enormous stalks of uprooted goldenrod, doffing their newsboy caps with gravitas.

I'm sure that before then, I'd seen goldenrod along the highways and in fields in Ohio, but I never noticed them. Now, and at the risk of sounding saccharine, they're forever linked with that city, and that summer, and being 19, and what a strange, hard, drunk, warm time that was in my life.