I’ve been radio silent for a while.  During January, Rob and I finished and submitted our book manuscript to Routledge Press.  I drafted and submitted a grant proposal to the National Writing Project.  I wrote my annual faculty activity report for Grand Valley.  And as of today I have a draft completed of a presentation I’m giving on Friday called “Comparing norms: A pragma-dialectic examination of model argumentation in U.S. secondary schools.”  Whew.  I used to believe that I was a procrastinator, but I don’t think that’s true anymore.  It’s Wednesday.  The presentation is Friday.  Yes, I still need to practice it, to make sure that the Power Point is what I want it to be, and to gather resources in order to be prepared for a question and answer session afterwards, but it’s good enough.  I can look back and see how much I have learned by writing it.  I can also see the road ahead that this presentation argues for–a mission should I choose to accept it.

All of this writing doesn’t make me immune to regret that I have not also been writing blog posts.  But making the list of what I’ve done helps me to tell that regretful little voice that life is full of hard choices.

This presentation, for the University of Amsterdam Department of Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric, could have been so daunting as to discourage me or paralyze me.  But it didn’t.  Something in me is changing.  No, it has changed.  I no longer despair that I have ideas that I can’t express in words.  There was a time that I did despair.  Once in graduate school, I had lunch with a professor to hear about her writing process.  After twenty minutes on the topic of her success, I excused myself from the table, went to the bathroom, and cried.

Today I know that thinking and writing are different artistic media.  The translation from ideas to sentences will always be a transformation.  What has changed is that today I’m ok with that.  I feel confident that I can make something with words that will have substance.  I can, that is, if I have the time.

Time, I have learned this last five months, is the fertile soil out of which written texts can grow.  I knew this intellectually before sabbatical, I just had not experienced that fertility.  Yes, I had plenty of time to myself without distractions when I was writing my dissertation, but I needed all of that time to get to this time.  Having had that time, I know more now than I did then.  Therefore I have more resources, more building blocks on my table when I sit down to make something.

This is not to say that I have all of the building blocks that I need.  I don’t know what I want to say already and only need the time to sit and write it down.  First, interesting scholarship isn’t like that.  And second, I have been and continue to be too much of an intellectual jack-of-all-trades to have a handle on even the small subfield of argumentation within the larger field of rhetoric and composition.  I’ve got a lot to learn.

Suddenly, though, I believe I will have a lot to say as I go about that learning.  I’m excited about the work I’m doing.  It’s fun.  It feels right, like I’m hearing the music for the dance steps I’ve been learning little by little for years.

Christmas in Atlanta with my nuclear family was wonderful.  Fires flickered in the fireplace.  The table groaned with wild rice casserole, homemade rolls, asparagus with hollandaise, and beef tenderloin.  Friends and extended family stopped by with gifts.  The cousins played endlessly outside in the crisp sunshine.  My dad and I delivered packages of Christmas sausage to friends.  I took long walks with my two sisters.  My mom made ornaments with Margaret and Caroline and kept me feeling loved with hugs and words of encouragement. 

Family and home.  Two sweet words.

Last night was our final one in Georgia, and the contrast with our life in Europe was particularly stark.  Imagine my whole family bush whacking their way through the pitch-black woods at ten o’clock at night, following the short barks of a blue tick hound who had treed a coon. Yes. That would be us raccoon hunting.

Fortunately for all involved, I begged off bringing Caroline, and my mom volunteered to stay at the house while she slept. She missed the excitement, but it didn’t start ’til after eight.

First, I guess I should say where we are. Not in Atlanta anymore. My dad likes to go somewhere rather than just have all eight grandkids tear their house apart and hurt each other when we all come into town for more than three days.

Last Christmas we rented houses at Calloway Gardens, which has a hundred acre Christmas light display and an animal safari nearby. This year, we came to Burge Plantation, a hunting estate owned by some family friends. I have, without a doubt, stepped back a hundred and fifty years, minus the laptop on the long dining room table where I sit by a fire this morning. The house where we are staying was “the big house” on a cotton plantation with about thirty slaves before the civil war. The diary of one of the mistresses of the house, Dolly Lunt Burge (1848-1879), has been edited and published. If I had the time, I could experience the civil war and Sherman’s march to the sea first hand through her words while sitting in her dining room. A Burge Plantation employee is in the kitchen, on the other side of the swinging door, preparing a breakfast for the fourteen of us. Biscuits, grits, bacon, and orange juice in a silver pitcher will undoubtedly be on the menu. Linen napkins have been laid around me while I type.

So, not only did my Dad want to drive down here, where we could have lots of property for long walks down to look at the horses and hunting dogs bawling in their kennels, but he also thought it would be fun to request a guided coon hunt–nocturnal of course.

“Wouldn’t the kids have fun hiking around in the woods after dark?” he asked. Yes indeed. Memorable. My dad is still sixteen at heart, and I love that.

So we met our guide and his dog after dark. Rocket, the blue tick hound, was big and strong. He was eight years old and larger than I imagined either Old Dan or Little Ann ever to have been. Our guide said that he’d been inspired to get a blue tick and hunt raccoons by Where the Red Fern Grows, so he could not only read, but make text to self and text to world connections too. (Sorry, bad teacher joke)

We drove into the woods, and he put a GPS collar on Rocket, walked him down a path along a stream for a bit, then let him off leash. We all waited silently to hear his “I found a scent” bawl. Silence. We chatted. We waited. As we talked, I heard a howl very faintly. Sure enough, a quarter of a mile away already, we heard intermittent bawling. We waited for the howling to get closer together, then for the barks that signaled that the racoon was treed. We waited some more. I got in the minivan to stay warm, with some little cousins and the Havanese dog that belongs to my sister and had to stay in the car. Long story short, we eventually followed the GPS by truck and minivan close to where Rocket had treed a coon. We hiked through woods thick with privet and thorny vines (whishing I were wearing full on Carharts rather than my new down coat from Zara) to the creek.

As you might imagine, Rocket was a sight to behold, barking up the tree. “Sometimes he’s so excited, he tries to bite the tree bark,” his guide said. The raccoon had run through the woods, Rocket on his tail, to his favorite hollow tree and climbed deep inside. We took turns peering up with flashlights into the hollow darkness, searching for eyes staring back at us.

Then we turned around and went home.

In Where the Red Fern Grows, someone takes an ax to the tree and stays up ’til dawn until the racoon becomes a hat. I was pleased that we let the Raccoon win this round, though Rocket was none too pleased to be pulled away from his find.

As we went to bed, Margaret said, “I felt sorry for Rocket. He worked so hard, and then we took his hard work away from him.”

“That’s what he lives for” I mused, “I think it’s more like playing IPad for two hours and then having your parent tell you it’s time to put it down and go to bed.”

Maybe she’s right, though. I can’t say I’m an expert on coon dogs anymore.

My kids love checking things off of lists.  This is a good thing.  I can make lists for how to get ready in the morning for school that actually get followed.  I can make lists for what to pack for a trip.  I can keep them interested a walking tour of a city simply by virtue of their being numbers to follow and check off as we go.  It should have come as no surprise, therefore, that when I read the Lonely Planet’s list of “Must See” attractions of ancient Rome, and Margaret realized that we only had one more to go before completing all five, her mind would be made up about what to do the next day.

As a result, we have spent half of each of the last two days in museums.  It was worthwhile.  Tomorrow, however, I want to wander medieval streets and do a lot of shopping.

The fifth and final stop on the Ancient Rome list was the Capitoline Museum.  We spent some time learning about Archimedes.  The museum has a temporary exhibit about him, a Greek mathematician, scientist, & engineer who was killed by the Romans, despite orders to the contrary, during the siege of Syracuse (in Greece) in 212 B.C.  The kids liked the hands-on example of an endless screw, the videos demonstrating the way to measure mass through water displacement, and replicas of the catapult that he designed.  The Capitoline is also home to scores of beautiful Roman statues, and we enjoyed looking for the characters we knew, like Diana, Bacchus, Hercules, and Cupid.

After the museum, we headed off with the promise of gelato toward the Trevi fountain, which we found crowded with teenagers and street vendors hawking toys to them.  Our gelato was mediocre (we should have consulted the guidebook for better place), but the girls aren’t connoisseurs.  They loved it.  Margaret is being adventurous and trying a new flavor whenever possible.  So far her favorite has been lemon rosemary.  Yesterday she tried coconut.

We walked on toward the Spanish Steps, and if anyone thinks that we walk the girls too far, they should have seen what happened when we got there.  After admiring the boat shaped fountain at the foot of the steps, Margaret turned around, challenged Steve to a race, and started running up. To both keep her safe and maintain his honor, Steve told Caroline to stay with me and took off after Margaret.  Already closer to Steve than me, Caroline yelled, “Wait for me!” and tried to run after them both.  Watching our five-year old race away from me up the stairs (she is surprisingly fast), I breathed a resigned sigh and began my own run upward just to keep her in sight.   Do we never stop?

Today, we enjoyed a coffee and croissant standing at a counter (like folks on their way to work do) as we hurried to the Vatican to try to catch Pope Francis’ Wednesday address at 10:30.  Lo and behold, we joined the crowd in seeing and hearing his homily, which was subsequently summarized in French, English, Spanish (again by him), Portuguese (I think), and German.  He encouraged us all to let Advent remind us that God draws near to us and encourages us to love each other and particularly to consider the needs of the poor.

Although we were wowed by the Sistine Chapel and the ancient Roman and Egyptian statues in the Vatican museums (the politics of whose collections were disturbing to Steve in particular), the fact that we started the day with Pope Francis topped it all for me.

Rome, Day 2 December 16

Our kids have three weeks off for the Christmas holidays (Winter Break) so that the international families at the school can travel home. We didn’t know that when we booked our to and from Amsterdam tickets back in June, so, with an extra week to kill before flying to the U.S. to see friends and family, we decided to take advantage of proximity and low European airfares and fly to Rome.

Today was day 2. Yesterday we visited the Colosseum. That might not sound like a full day’s itinerary, but we stopped at churches (Chiesa del Gesu) and monuments (Il Vittoriano) along the way, stood in awe of the street performers (Caroline), took a tour of the main structure (all of us), took a second tour of the basement and upper levels (Steve and Margaret), and ate two good meals and more than one gelato. Walking from our hotel near the Piazza Navona to the Collosseum and back was a long way, particularly as there was so much to see, and so many pebbles for Caroline to kick.

Today we walked even further.

We again walked all of the way to the Colosseum, this time by way of the Pantheon (amazing), and kept going around the fenced off Roman Forum to enter it from the Via di San Gregorio at the base of the Palantino. We purchased 2 audio guide headphones (I should have gotten four), and began our walk around the Forum and Palatino. Three hours later, I was wondering why I hadn’t been more prepared with snacks and band-aids (ancient cobble stone streets = skinned knee). The kids were d-o-n-e. Even the cult of the Vestal virgins was less important than food. The stadio was lovely, and Steve was sad that we didn’t have time to go into the Palatino Museum before the deadline to return the headsets. While we were perfectly wiling to hop a bus, tram or taxi if one appeared, we didn’t see any going the right direction, and our guidebooks didn’t offer much hope, so we set off in the direction of food.

Let’s just say we walked a lot today, and the girls earned the shared hamburger and individual two-scoop gelatos that we eventually fed them. After lunch we walked all of the way from the Aventino hill, through the Circus Maximus, by the Boca della Verita, along the Tiber, and back through the winding streets (where Steve bought me a new leather computer bag for Christmas!) to home.

Tomorrow, la dolce vita fashion be damned, I might have to wear my running shoes.

Last Friday, our friends from Grand Rapids, the Staggs family, flew back to the U.S.  They lived across town here in Utrecht for the last three months.  This Thanksgiving day (which isn’t celebrated here at all of course), I’m giving thanks for our chance to share this experience with those who have come to visit for a short stay and with the Staggs for all of the autumn.  Sharing the adventure makes me smile.  The Staggs were simply wonderful friends to us.  I’m thankful for the wonderful Monday night meals they cooked while Margaret had gymnastics class in their neighborhood; for the double date dinners curtesy of their thirteen-year-old daughter who is mature enough to babysit; for croissants for breakfast with Becky; and for biking with Brian to the university library to study for a few hours. 

Yes, it’s true that we may find another babysitter.  It’s true that multiple neighbors have offered to keep a baby-monitor at their row house while Steve and I go down to the corner for a glass of wine in the evenings after the girls are asleep.  But we will miss our friends.     

I’m thankful that they will be back for another three months in the spring.  

I’ve let a month go by without blogging. Here are some highlights:

Steve flew home to Michigan to work for three weeks. He missed us terribly (and he missed his bike).

We found the swimming pool, about a 30 minute bike ride across town. It does have a great water slide and several hot tubs, though the latter do not capacity limits and are usually standing room only.

On October 31, we attended a Halloween party at the home of an American classmate of Margaret’s.

On November 11th, the kids went door to door for candy the Dutch way–to celebrate the feast of St. Maarten, patron saint of Utrecht. Sint Maarten was known for his generosity. Statues depict him on a horse, cutting his cloak in half to share what he owned with the poor. The half-red, half-white crest of the city represents the torn cloak.

To prepare for St. Maarten’s Day, the girls and I attended arts and craft time in the cathedral pasting streamers onto milk cartons to make lanterns. (A medieval cathedral is a surreal setting for scissors, glue, hot chocolate and cookies.) After dark, we joined the other children carrying the lanterns (lampions) around town, singing St. Maarten’s songs and receiving treats from neighbors for their melodies. It was lovely to watch the lanterns bob up and down the street while toddlers practiced the songs and older elementary school children sang with well-taught precision. We had YouTube to thank for our ability to sort of sing two of the songs.

Monday morning, the doorbell rang at 7:30 a.m. Actually, it rang four times, until I finally heard it when I came down from our third floor bedroom. It was Steve, an hour earlier than I expected him. *Sometimes* travel goes even more smoothly than you expect. This sort of balances the times that it is a royal nightmare.

I’ve been running pretty consistently, and there have been enough dry half-hours to make it really fun. The leaves on the trees have been lovely.

Speaking of autumn, the streets are busy with municipal street cleaning vehicles that sweep up all of the fallen leaves–one more example of the amazingly high level of government infrastructure here.

Last night, the Staggs and we went to a jazz concert: Medinski, Martin & Wood. They were amazing to see live, and the venue is an easy 7 minute walk up the canal. All of our kids had a sleep over, which was not so great for sleeping.

Tonight, early bedtimes for all.

Friday was Caroline’s 5th birthday. Two weeks ago, before I left for France, I casually asked our two closest neighbors if they would like to come over in the evening to celebrate. As the day neared, I got increasingly nervous about having people over. It seemed like a heavy responsibility to throw a party here. I don’t know hospitality customs. Caroline, too, was reluctant to have a party at all. When I asked her how she wanted to celebrate, she replied that she wanted a “private party” with just Margaret, and to turn the living room into a “cool obstacle course by stacking pillows on the couch.” This she promptly began to do, and by the time Margaret put her book down and came to see what the excited laughter was about, Caroline had constructed exactly what she wanted. They proceeded to turn somersaults down a stack of cushions for the next half hour. Party? Check. If that’s all Caroline wants, I’m glad that we can meet her desires so readily.

Meanwhile, another mother at the International School of Utrecht was trying to contact me. Her son Judah’s birthday was October 10th (Caroline’s is the 11th). She wanted to know if I wanted to coordinate a joint celebration for the class. She planned to make apple muffins with icing (satisfying the desire for cake with a modicum of nutrition). I volunteered to bring gift bags for each student, as I’d seen other families do. She also sheepishly told me that she had planned a birthday party for Judah on Caroline’s actual birthday, and that he really wanted her to come.

“Would she like to come? I know it’s a bit awkward that it’s on her birthday. You could bring a cake too and we could sing to her also. It’s at a park around the corner just after school on Friday.”

I told Judah’s mom that Caroline would love to come. No problem. We already had a plan to have her cake at home in the evening. Wednesday evening over dinner, I went over the schedule that was forming for her birthday. This was a mistake.

Me: First we will have breakfast at home; is there a special thing that you want?

Steve: We haven’t had French toast since we got here.

Caroline: French toast!

Me: Then you will have cupcake-muffins and gift bags at school.

Caroline: I don’t want to give gift bags.

Me: [Moving on] Then we will go to the park and play with some classmates to celebrate that it’s Judah’s birthday also. Then we will have a private family dinner, just like you wanted.

Caroline: I want pasta.

Me: And then Ties and Sterra, Ottilie and their parents will come over for some cake. And Cormac and the Staggs.

Caroline: I don’t want them to come!

Caroline then proceeded to tell us that she desperately wanted to throw a birthday party and invite her two favorite classmates, Aimie and Atrina. There were tears. She yelled/cried and accused me of “making her decisions for her.” Now, I’m proud to say, she can throw a four-year-old temper tantrum with five-year-old words.

After this display, I started wondering whether Caroline would be rude to our Dutch neighbors when they come over to share a piece of birthday cake on Friday evening. I had made simple invitations using the back-sides of symmetrical geometric shapes that Caroline had colored and delivered them to our two neighbors and our friends the Staggs by hand. “Please come for a slice of cake and a glass of wine from 7 to 8” they read. One hour. Would it be a social disaster?

Thursday dawned dry. Becky Staggs and I had lunch together, and she helped me shop at the discount store for gift bags and stuff to put into them: balloons, curly straws, mini-notebooks, raisins and one tiny lollipop. After school, Margaret and Caroline came to the store with me to buy ingredients for chocolate cake. At home, both were delightfully enthusiastic about filling the gift bags…all 32, which took a while. (The International School Utrecht is small because it’s in its 2nd year. That said, although most classes are a combination of two grades, there are so many kindergarteners that they divide them into two groups for much of the day.)

After Caroline went to bed, Margaret begged to stay up and decorate the first floor of the house with me. We hung the two colorful strings of flags that our Dutch neighbors had lent us. We blew up balloons and taped them to the dining room table. Margaret decorated Caroline’s table setting with a name card. She found that caring older-sister spirit that sometimes gets lost and let it shine.

October 11th dawned in pouring rain. Steve warmed the house with French toast. Margaret kept acting the kind sister role. Caroline asked her to bush her hair (usually a tear-inducing morning chore). They practically held hands and skipped downstairs. Margaret showed C to her special place at the table. C wanted M to sit by her. We had a delicious breakfast. Caroline opened a few presents, choosing the ones from Margaret and my parents, which included found-objects from around the city like an old motorbike tire and a castle-shaped 3-D puzzle. (Guess who gave what.)

Steve biked the girls to school in the rain, carrying a big plastic bag of smaller gift bags. I debated going too, but decided just to let it be. Caroline was happy. I reminded myself that it’s good to stay in the background when sisterly good feelings dawn to warm the sometimes icy landscape of sibling competition. Hopefully Steve would take a picture of Caroline in her classroom. (He did.)

All day I worked on the book manuscript and measured cake ingredients on a few breaks between 25 minute writing sessions. When I took Caroline to Judah’s party in the afternoon, lo and behold, Atrina and Aimie had been invited too. The three girls jumped together on the trampoline and climbed around on the jungle gym in between raindrops. Atrina and Caroline got a bit frustrated with each other toward 4:30, which made it easier to head home at 5:00 while Judah opened his presents.

We were greeted by steaming pasta, more family gifts to open (as I write, Caroline and Margaret are sculpting with some new play-dough), and a cake to mix and bake. Steve had bought wine. After dinner we arranged wine glasses, took quick showers, and were ready and waiting with warm chocolate cake and red wine when the neighbors arrived. There were three cheek kisses and “Congratulations!” all around. As a hard-working mom, I like the Dutch “Congratulations!” as the common birthday greeting.

The Staggs were the hit of the kids’ evening because they brought cupcakes shaped and decorated like hamburgers with “mustard, catsup, and relish” icing. Caroline giggled asking all four Dutch kids if they wanted “een hamburger” (same word in Dutch). We lit one candle (what happened to the others that I bought??) and sang “Happy Birthday” in English, then our neighbors sang in Dutch. Theirs is a rousing song with a lot of hip hip hoorays at the end: “Hieperdepierp Hoera!” 

The sweet red wine recommended by the vintner at the end of our block was delicious. The warm chocolate cake (that’s actually a brownie recipe) was as good as I remembered it from when Brian made it for Household one Sunday night last year. We were liberal with the whipped cream (this is Holland). Caroline oohed and aahed over t
he Staggs’ gifts, including a jar of lovely flower shaped and scented soaps. Margaret made everyone laugh when she spoke the truth a little too loud: “I need to use that mint one on my armpits!” The neighbors’ gifts were so thoughtful and perfect for the 5 year old: sparkly jewelry and art supplies.

It was a good night. It felt like an elegant, hour-long wine and chocolate party for eight adults and a concurrent, blessedly short cupcake and apple cider party for eight kids. The Staggs’ ever-patient 13-year-old fell somewhere in the middle, and I found her reading upstairs at midpoint. (Girl, I totally get where you’re coming from.)

I even helped to Skype with both grandmothers and got Caroline into bed without a tantrum (ok, there was plenty of bossy backtalk), but after so much sugar and excitement, that felt like a feat. When I started to sing a song to C to say goodnight as is my custom, she put her fingers in her ears. Unfortunately, I think she picked this rude gesture up from me and Steve, because sometimes when she’s screaming her frustration, I can both protect my long-term hearing and still hear her just fine if I put my fingers in my ears. It’s actually easier to interact with her with consistency and kindness when my ears aren’t in pain. So her rude response to my song wasn’t worthy of chastisement, it just meant that I stopped, kissed her forehead, and left the room promptly. If she’s going to act rudely, then I can choose not to stick around for it. So, that was the anti-climactic end to her birthday.

Now it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m journaling before I turn to revising a book chapter. After rereading and remembering the end to Caroline’s birthday, I chuckle to note that when I’ve lain in bed reviewing my day before sleep the last two nights, it has been bedtime with Caroline that I savor. Everything just goes more smoothly when it’s not rushed. When we haven’t just had a birthday party, we have been lying side by side, reading One Dog and his Boy by Eva Ibbotson aloud, and the story is both gripping and dear. Then I asked her, last night, if I could give her “drie kussen” (three kisses) back and forth on her cheeks.

“No” she replied. “I want to kiss your nose.” [She did.] “Now you kiss mine.” [I did.] “Now do what I do,” she said. [She kissed my forehead.] So on we went, playing follow the leader with face kisses, her giggling and me filled with joy and awe at this beautiful little girl whom I get to love everyday.

Right now I’m sitting at the Klein Dom playground (Little Cathedral playground).  It’s an urban park behind a gate.  We had heard from neighbors that it was here for several weeks before we actually found it–only about 100 yards from our house tucked behind the street front of row houses.  As I write, our girls are playing in the water and sand.  It is amazing, this water course contraption, with sand to build dikes, canals, and islands.  Polder play, perhaps I should call it. 

As I look around, I see Dutch kids imbibing national values effortlessly.  There are three and four wheeled cycles provided for young kids to learn to pedal and steer.  There is water to redirect with shifting levers, tubes, and piles of unruly sand.  True, it’s not all cycles and water management; there are also an inset trampoline, requisite swings and climbing structures, and a small field hockey court provided with sticks.   This public playground employs an attendant at least a few hours per day to gather up the cycles and equipment into the playhouse a half hour before closing.  It’s a large space, which makes our inability to find it all the funnier.

Watching the girls elbow deep in drippy sludge, I’m reminded of a conversation with my sister over dinner one night in Atlanta.  The elementary school that her kids attended was about to renovate their playground, and they had hired a nature consultant.

“Kids need to pick lots of little things up, to pile and sort them, to build things, not just to swing on a jungle gym and run around on a flat, grass field.  They need to play in the woods.  Trinity is trying to make their playground more nature-play-friendly,” I recall her saying, referencing the research in the book, Last Child in the Woods.

This playground certainly meets the gold standard of interactivity: kids are nudged to dig, to pile, to design, to learn about gravity, force, and trajectory.  But…it is dirty. 

Maybe this is too dirty for a school playground.  I can imagine the amount of sand that would be tracked into classrooms if, day after day, the children were playing in this sand and water after lunch.  They would certainly have to have outside boots and indoor shoes.

When I read this to Margaret, she said, “It would fit well at Stepping Stones Montessori.  Kids there like to play in the woods and build stuff.  Students do wear outside shoes on the playground and get messy.  Except on ‘pajama day’ some of the girls wore frilly nightgowns.”

“Like Fancy Nancy did?” I replied.

“Yea, and they had to be more careful, but they did like to play on the jungle gym.”

Maybe I could see it at Stepping Stones.  It might be a paradigm shift for some parents in Atlanta, though.  A few springs ago, we were staying with my parents over Easter.  Caroline was, as usual, unwilling to stay at Sunday school by herself.  So I was outside on a glorious morning in the First Presbyterian playground, where the preschoolers were able to go after they had heard a story, sung a song, colored pictures and eaten snacks.  These kids were in their Easter best–tiny guys in seersucker suits and girls in white dresses with ruffles.  And they were playing in the sandbox.  I wondered how all of that sand was going to go over.  Maybe parents learn to handle that balance. 

There is a time for sand, and a time for soap.    

What am I learning about myself, being over here on sabbatical?

Well, I’m learning that I don’t like to ask people for favors. I like to be self-sufficient. Yes, it may be pride, but I also hate to think that I’ve inconvenienced anyone. I noticed this quite clearly about myself this past Saturday.

As I wrote in the Storage Unit post, we’ve got a furniture problem. Helping me to solve this problem has been a kind Dutch woman named Ina. Ina is an art curator, otherwise employed, so I know her time is precious. Asked by the Canadian expats who were here last year to help transfer their furnishings from their house to ours, Ina also looked at two apartments for us back in July and advised us via email about their charms and limitations.

Ina is the one who met us at the storage unit with the keys when we arrived. She’s also the one I emailed last week with a plea for help. Our two week window for emptying the storage unit was closing and my hours of navigating the Markplaats website (i.e. Ebay) and posting our ads on Expat.com had resulted in zero phone calls. Likewise, my phone calls to several kringlopers (i.e. Goodwill) had been unsuccessful–none of them were immediately willing to drive to the Hilversum Shurgard with a truck. Self-sufficiency was not solving my problem.

After reading my polite plea for advice, Ina called another second hand store and reported that she thought this smaller kringloper would pick up the stuff on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. This is still one week after the deadline to not have to pay another month’s rent on the storage unit, but it was incremental progress.

In the meantime, Ina and the manager of the storage unit also had another plan. When we were there in Hilversum in August, they recommended that if our two-week window closed, that I start a new contract for the unit in my name, which would reduce the rent to the promotional, first-month rate for new customers. When I called the company to set this up (from my office phone in Amsterdam), the receptionist told me that it was impossible. So, following Ina’s additional advice, I made an in-person appointment for 10 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Dutifully, I emailed Ina to let her know. She wrote back, “Do you need me to pick you up at the train station?”

Now, it’s a twenty minute train ride from Utrecht to Hilversum, and the storage unit place is two miles from the train station. It costs extra money and significant effort to wrangle a bike up and down train track overpasses and on and off a train. So, did I ask Ina to pick me up at the train station?

No. I didn’t want to inconvenience her.

Instead, I decided that the simplest thing was for me to bike to the Utrecht train station, park and lock up my bike, take the train to Hilversum, then jog from the station in Hilversum to the storage unit, knowing that the likelihood would be high that it would be raining. I would have to leave home by 8:40 to make the 10 a.m. appointment–on my day off with the kids.

“I like to jog every day,” I told her in an email.

So as I was jogging in the rain to the station, she passed me in her car. When I arrived at the storage unit, she was waiting for me with a glass of water. What followed was a lengthy conversation in Dutch between Ina and the storage unit employee.

“Did you understand us?” she asked me.

“No, not at all,” I replied.

Well, she went on to explain. Because I had called on the telephone in English, and phone calls are recorded for quality assurance, the employee had to follow the rules precisely, and she could not simply change the name on the unit and reduce the rate to the promotional level for me. “They don’t want young people storing their band equipment to simply change the name to a friend’s identity each month to keep getting the promotional deal,” she said. Understandable.

Nonetheless, all of my effort to get here to Hilversum was a waste of time, I thought. I conjured an image of what I was missing at home by being there: Steve and the girls, eating pancakes in a warm kitchen on a Saturday morning. I imagined reading books with one of them on the couch. My eyes started to fill with tears.

Seeing my distress, Ina offered to drive me to her house for coffee and then to the train station. I said (I hope politely), “Oh, just to the train station will be fine. Thank you so much.” On the drive to the station, I thanked Ina for being so kind to help us with the storage unit problem, when she was getting nothing out of it. (I still don’t know if a bill for her time is forthcoming.)

“I’m helping you because I know what it is like,” she replied, “to move to a new country and start from nothing. I have done it several times, though I usually knew the language.”

Ina then narrated her end of the phone calls to several kringlopers: “The woman said that there was nothing in it for her, but she could hear in the sound of my voice that we really needed help, so she took pity on us and will take the stuff to help us out.” Then she repeated her message to me, “When we landed in a new country, people helped us when we needed help. Now I’m helping you. The kringloper woman is helping us. That’s what makes the world go ’round,” she concluded, gesturing in a circle with her hand.

How, I wondered, do I thank her? Gifts? Time together over coffee? Is a smile of appreciation and a hand written card enough? And perhaps my inefficient trip to Hilversum wasn’t a waste of time. I let her see my honest feelings and my trouble, and she responded with compassion. It’s that compassion that is going to solve our problem, not my self-sufficiency.