Solivagant Again!

Who said you can’t learn anything from Instagram…. this week the word solivagant popped up in my feed and I love it, it means wandering alone, something that I've been doing for quite a while. Actually, my wandering started off with a bike ride to a local wine village called Thüngersheim, the reason was to sketch and to check out the ''Culture Gadens''; a gaden was a single room house (often on several floors) as part of a fortified church. 

Here you can see my sketch and the side of the gaden facing the church, the gadens were not connected and could be barricaded shut on both sides. 

I liked this view better than from the ''front'', the restored buildings have modern integrated metal grills on the façades and I wanted to enjoy the fabulous half-timbering which has been dendro dated to about 1410, and that for me is always the fascination. Did the people building these houses ever think that over 600 years later they would still be standing, and appreciated by tourists and sketchers like me. What dramas played out in this tranquil square. The plague, wars, witch hunts, climate change, these buildings have seen it all. 

During a break in sketching I happened across one of two gravestones mounted on the church wall, and one of the personal tragedies became clear. The inscription reads '' In the year 1789, on 1st April,  my little daughter, Francischa  Elisabetha Brönerin died of smallpox, at midday between 11 and 12''. The second gravestone, nearly identical in style testifies to the death of Michael Bröner, Francischa's brother on the same day and the same time, the childrens' mother must have been distraught! Two children lost to smallpox on the same day.

I try to avoid wading into controversial subjects but this made me think about vaccines and how in my lifetime the fear of dying from such illnesses has been reduced (the last official smallpox victim was in the 1970"s). We now have an outbreak of monkey pox, polio in London and of course the ever present COVID. I was lucky enough to be able to protect my child against illnesses that resulted in traumatic deaths and I was grateful! Believe me I know that vaccines can have terrible side effects, we had friends whose daughter was damaged for life by a vaccine but I also had a neighbour who was in a wheelchair from childhood after getting polio. As a child of the late 60's I remember the photos of hundreds of children in iron lungs watching life pass through a mirror above their heads and I am concerned that people refusing to vaccinate their children will lead to a resurgence in diseases that long seemed dormant. Faced with the tragedy of this mother’s double loss, I wondered how this mother would have chosen if she had had the chance to vaccinate her children. 

Having finished my sketching, I decided to head for home only to find that my front tire was flat (yet again), it’s a recurring valve problem and so once more, I had to push my bike home in our fabulous heatwave. Solivagant once again, I pushed my bike through the vineyards homeward.