Last Days

So many last days this fall.  Days when you think:  this is it, the last beautiful day, and you drop everything and head to the woods or the cafe with the courtyard or stretch out the yoga mat on the balcony or stroll around a decrepit neighborhood and find it all so inspiring, darling, don't you think?    You think it can never last, the ivy so red and the sky so blue.  This must be the last dry and sunny day before the wet German winter sets in.  There've been so many of them, and in every city we've been in over the past month - Berlin and Köln, Düsseldorf and Kassel and Magdeburg and Göttingen.

One of the best of them I got to share with my sister, cooking food from the Markthalle and eating on the balcony in the sun.  We were missing our men - R was holding down the fort in Berlin, F was racing the half in Cologne - so we made them this guided tour to brunch in the village with the sisters.