Posted on 06/20/2019 7:46:53 PM PDT by thecodont
For nearly a century, an oak in a German forest has helped lonely people find love—including the mailman who delivers its letters.
Every morning for 20 years, Karl-Heinz Martens steered his yellow mail truck through the narrow streets of Eutin, a market town arranged around a little castle in northern Germany, near the Baltic Sea. On his route, Martens would drive through miles of farms and fields before disappearing into a deep, enchanted forest, where he unlocked a gate using a special key and reversed into his parking spot—as all mailmen do—facing outward to ensure a quick exit. As he crunched into the woods carrying his mailbag, his tidy beard and glasses were sometimes flecked with snowflakes or sleet, and every morning, just before the clock struck 12, he arrived beneath a towering oak.
“People used to memorize my route and wait for me to arrive because they couldn’t believe that a postman would deliver letters to a tree,” Martens told the press, who called the now-retired mailman the “messenger of love.” The Bräutigamseiche, or Bridegroom’s Oak, is the only tree in Europe with its own mailing address. Every day the 500-year-old tree receives dozens of lonely-hearts letters, and singletons arrive from near and far to reach into a small knothole in the trunk, hoping to find a match. The tree is believed to possess magical matchmaking powers.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
A sweet, romantic story.
Does this tree have an American equivalent?
Because of a horrible misunderstanding on the meaning of "matchmaking" we chopped it down, cut it in to millions of small sticks and tipped them with potassium chlorate.
A great story. Thanks for posting it.
Mexico has ( or had) the singing bush.
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