Germany is enchanting. Weaving through the modern houses in Ramstein to make it to a trail my phone is directing me towards, the evergreen trees of the forest tower in the background. Sure, the sky is gray, and it is below freezing; frost dominates the cars that line the streets and decorates foliage; but the clouds have variation and nuance. Despite the cold, it’s still quite green.

I understand the folklore and fairytales a bit better now that I’ve gone on a few local adventures. One moment you are walking next to a train track with a dense forest next to you, and the next you are out in an emerald frosted field. A ruin, looking impossibly old, rises from the reeds, a tumultuous cloud cover looming over it, signaling cold.

From the field another enchanted forest, wild blackberry brambles and fallen mossy branches litter the forest floor, a soft covering of fallen deciduous leaves giving off a pleasant scent of gradual decay. Time is either stopped or moving much faster here, it’s hard to tell. Another abandoned structure, either hundreds of years old or left there in 2016; could either in this space.

If you pushed your hand into the thick moss on that dead stump in the middle of the darkest part, I’m pretty sure you’d get pulled into another world where the fae feast and you forget who you are.

I walk with the modern assurance that the forest will release me back to the paved streets of Ramstein, to a road whose name designates which other village you can reach if you walk on it long enough. Ancestors weren’t wrong feeling the black eyes of the crows gazing down as they wound through these magic places, hoping to make it back to their cozy fires.