Chicken gods and hand grenades

If you have ever been to the local Baltic Sea, you will know them: the chicken gods - or more understandable: stones with holes... You walk along the Baltic Sea beach for hours, bend down hundreds of times, and realize that there is no hole in the stone. Great joy when finally eeeendlich one is found and becomes a lucky charm on the old house key. Or if Fortuna is so infinitely kind to you, you find several that are neatly threaded on a string and hung on the front door as the 'brings-super-luck' version.

This old custom is also known in Normandy - but with the difference that the chicken gods lie here by the hundreds on the stone beach and we just have to collect them. It is much more exhausting afterwards to pick out the most beautiful ones from the mountain and determine which talisman is responsible for which little luck...

We arrived at the beach via a bumpy and narrow coastal path and first bathed the sweat from the climbing tour in the gentle waves. Then we start the search: alternately we squeak with joy when we find one, hold it up happily and look at each other lovingly through the hole in the god.

Just as I'm about to bend down again to collect a particularly round and reddish-brown little object from the pebbles, I am pulled violently backwards on my right arm, so that tears shoot into my eyes in pain!!! Hand grenade!!! the mouse excitedly shouts in my ear!

We both make a tremendous two-meter jump backwards and throw ourselves to the ground with torn arms and legs in fear of a deafening detonation of the fragment explosive. Still with my face in the gravel, I slowly count to twenty..., when there is still no loud thunderclap, I take my face out of the dirt again.

It was here in Normandy that the fierce battles of the Allied landing troops took place in the Second World War, and despite many search operations, there is still a lot of old ammunition and similar nonsense lying around here, which, if mishandled, still likes to fly around your ears with great enthusiasm after 80 years.

It's a good thing that the mouse grew up in a region where the Russian armed forces once advanced on Berlin and every school year began with an admonition: rusty metal things lying in the ground niieeee!!! touch and notify the ABV!

I'm considering how best to inform the French bomb disposal service about our 'bombastic' find, but first I crawl, much to the amusement of the mouse, over the pebble beach to the suspected dud...

All clear!

Upon closer examination, I realize that it is only the shell of an egg hand grenade - the igniter and explosive charge were lost or properly disposed of many years ago.

Had a lucky escape..., it could have turned out differently.

Relieved, we now look at our small collection of chicken gods and then ask ourselves: which one was the lucky charm for finding egg hand grenades on the beach?

For the rest of my days, I will now kneel on the pebble beach in front of my savior and read all her wishes in her eyes out of gratitude and deep connection!

***...Here while typing, the mouse asks: 'Should there be blood in it?' My answer: 'Yeeees! Lots of blood!'...