Spo's photos with the keyword: orange

I was strolling the street one night, minding my own business, when they came, hummed down like an old hoover and parked on a nearby hill. I cursed my almost dead battery, managed to grab a picture and walked cautiously closer. Soon enough a small door whirred open, and an old-looking chap limped to me. He said I looked wasted and offered me a buffet in their canteen. I have nothing against buffets, quite the contrary, all of us Finns absolutely love buffets, but I suspected it might be even more costly on this ship than on the cruise ship to Sweden. He assured me it would cost me nothing at all and kindly led me in. And what a "canteen" it was! There were these huge chandeliers hanging from the unvisible ceiling (they called them engines), and underneath them the cornucopia of diners were gathered for the feast, toiling and moiling and babbling with their plates, and so varying in sizes and colors they were that I sometimes had trouble telling them from the dish. With the help of my friend I managed to fill my tray, and we sat down to a cosy little table in the middle. When I eat, I usually read at the same time, but since their was nothing even vaguely readable at hand, between my mouthfuls I started to tell him about life on Earth. He looked interested, the others too, and the babble around me gradually quieted down, and when I got to the Berlin wall, most of them had stopped eating and just gazed at me. Even though I know I'm a pretty eloquent storyteller, the silence was slightly awkward first, but the main course was so delicious I soon forgot their staring. However, I was pretty sure that they started to get restless when I got to the other wall, the Trump one, and soon enough, my friend rose up, grabbed me by the arm and without a word led me to the hall. So hasty he was I barely had time to snatch a juicy-looking Schtumpfenstrüdel or whatever it was in my breast pocket. He guided me out, swiftly waved his hand at me, and the ship zoomed away before he had properly closed the door behind him. I've patrolled the streets every night since then but haven't seen a glimpse of them. I have no idea what alarmed them so, but my wife suspects that I – as usual – might have belched at the table. Without the photo she would never believe my story, she says.

Story goes that a father planted this pine-tree for his new-born child so that, in due course, it would provide planks for his/her coffin. The story does not tell why the tree was never cut down; most likely the baby died young. Infant mortality was very high in the area in those times, because the whole families, including mothers and older kids worked in the fields all day long, and infants were left home alone with their rudimentary "automated" feeding devices - that is, milk-filled cattle horns that were left hanging upside down at their reach. Those "baby bottles" were astute sources of infections. The habit of leaving children by themselves may not have been the best nourishment for their emotional developement either, and might well have contributed to the social troubles in the area those days, most notably the rise of the so called Bads , who caused havoc in the area for hundred years. The advent of the Bads is usually explained by socioeconomic reasons, like by the local inheritance rule, where one descendant got it all and forced other siblings to buy their share of the patrimony from the heir and fund the purchase by selling lumber or distilling pine tar for shipbuilding. This worked fine as long as lumber for those pursuits existed; when the forests dwindled down, non-heirs were left on empty, got frustrated – and turned into Bads. That ended when the "excess" population prone to bad habits emigrated to America – which, in turn, may explain why the US... oh well, let's not get into that! From America as well as from Russia we got this new, weird idea , which led us to our one and only civil war. The idea was called socialism . It took us 80 000 White soldiers to put an end to it, while Americans got away with one McCarthy. (Americans called it communism, but it was only because to them all Europeans are socialists, and you have to tell those two apart somehow, don't you?) In Russia the funny idea that all men are – were – equal lasted longer and provided them enough time to round it out more elegantly, without war. But let's not get into that either! Today, all that is just annoying, distant history, and all men are happily unequal again, more and more so every day – some, like immigrants, even more unequal than others. And no, we won't get into that either, because there is nothing left there to get into: our present state of affairs is the final Arcadia, Lintukoto, Paradise, Narnia, Summerland, Xanadu, Heaven, you name it – or the Tree of Life if you will; end of all roads, singularity without alternatives. . . . Sorry about all that; it must have been the limbs of the tree that carried me away – too far away someone might say – and out on a limb at that. Someone else might call it irony. Anyway, the tree in the picture goes by the name Coffin Tree in the local map, so the story might as well be true. The first story, that is.