Of Storks & Babies

My friend collects vintage storks, as do I, so when I spotted this card, I had to post it here:

A bonnie Scotch laddie wi' kilties to his knees kin nay do wi'out ye, an' yearns to bae your cheese cake. He kenn hoo to play the bagpipe un hae muckle siller, un your only trouble will be the keeping o' his knees warm, in fact most o' your troubles will be little ones. Dinna pass him up.

May the collector with the bigger budget win. lol

Storks are fertility symbols and I've long wondered why. They aren't particularly cuddly looking... Too pointy to have near delicate babes. Which is why I collect them. Maybe if I see enough of them I'll figure something out. But so far, no luck.

I asked my German grandma because I remember her talking about actual "stork children".

She said storks were lucky; so, therefore, were folks who had babies. But I pushed about the old fable.

She said that the souls of the unborn lived in watery areas such as marshes and ponds and in the caves and rocky areas around them -- the "Adeborsteine" or "storkstones" -- and that storks, who frequented both such watery places and the steep rock crevasses, were the creatures who fetched the souls as babies & delivered them to their parents.

This, of course, from a woman who thought that she was dying when she got her period and she had no knowledge of such things. So it could be complete BS, yah?

But I did some searching for 'storks' and 'Adeborsteine' and found this. So she isn't nutty -- or at least she's no more nutty than the rest of our German ancestors. *wink*

She had no info to offer on this old post... Do you yet?