It is a weird winter this year. Now we are in the dead of it and still the temperatures are in the plus. Instead of snow, there was lots and lots of rain recently. Peppered with devastating storms.

I went for a walk to nearby woods and could witness the mess, the wind has made recently. Broken and fallen trees everywhere.

And the surplus of rainfall created swamps and little lakes where they shouldn’t be. In fact the area around Berlin is named “Brandenburger Sandkiste” which translates to “Brandenburg’s sand pit”. There is little rain in comparison to the rest of Germany, and if it does rain, the water disappears through the sandy underground very fast. Not so this winter: pools and water standing ankle-deep.

This situation got me kind of trapped on my way over the fields. There are little trenches between some of the fields but in all the years I have been around, there was next to no water in them. All these rivulets drain into something, an Austrian resists to call stream yet (as the water just seems to stand there, going nowhere, seemingly). In Austria, water inadvertedly flows but mostly rushes, as the ground is never really flat.

Different story in Berlin. People say, the city is smelly, because river Spree never runs anywhere but just sloshes back and forth.

But back to my walk. I wanted to cross a field, when I all of a sudden looked at this:

On the right hand side is, what usually is “the rivulet”, in the front is the ditch that normally is dry. Not so yesterday. It was full up to its brim, too deep to wade trough and too wide to jump.  As the field is sourrounded by such ditches, I guessed, they would be full everywhere. I wondered, where exactly I got into this mess. There must have been a little crossing or bridge somewhere, that I had overlooked. So there were two choices: either retrack my steps until I got somewhere, I could get home on dry foot. Or else walk along the trenches to find a spot narrow enough to jump.

I opted for the latter, I hate walking back the same way. Luckily, a couple of hundred meters up I found a spot where I could jump over the little stream without getting very wet. Just one foot was flooded a little, despite my ankle-high Wellies. Later a Lady walking her dog gestured me toward a little bridge to cross the rivulet proper. This got me back on my track home again.