Lindsay Maddox Ellis

Describing her own sabbatical year here in the Netherlands, my friend Anne told me that one of her mantras was, “If the sun is shining, better take an umbrella.”  I thought she was exaggerating.  She wasn’t. 

The weather here is variable, to put it mildly.  Sun, clouds, rain, wind—these all coexist within an hour.  This is fun to watch out of an upper-floor window, but it makes planning any activity very difficult.

This week I’ve settled into a productive writing schedule.  I like to work for an hour or two after the girls leave for school, go for a jog, work another hour, have lunch, work another hour, take a shower, and so on.  When I’m in this groove, the jog, meal, and shower become rewards for keeping my fingers on the keyboard and my mind on task for two twenty-five minute work sessions.  This is a modified version of The Pomodoro Technique, and I even use a twenty-five minute online timer called Ding.   Sounds great, right?

Here’s the problem.  Earlier this week, for two hours in the morning, I wrote and gazed lovingly at the blue sky.  Committed to my task, I kept editing the narrative at hand.  I clocked in my four Pomodoros.  Whew, time for a break.  I strapped on my running shoes and opened the door.  Pouring rain. 

I then felt like Margot in All Summer In A Day by Ray Bradbury.  Where did that sunshine go?  Will it ever come back? 

The difference between a run with the sun shining and a run under a dark cloudy sky is vast.  If there is light, then the leaves are green; the bricks are red; the sky is blue.  There is color!  If the sky is flat grey; the world is greyer too.  There are no shadows to create dimensionality.  The dial is turned down to mute.

So.  Here’s my new mantra:  if the sun is shining, go for a jog.  Leave the timer. Take it while you got it.

The twenty-five minute sessions will be there when I get home. 

In this climate, my life now seems governed by smaller increments of time.  Clocking my 25 minute pomodoros and watching the states of the sky is giving me the sense that no situation is very permanent.  It’s shaping how I see everything.  So the kids are fighting?  Don’t despair that they will be like that forever; in half an hour they may be hugging each other and giggling.  So, I’m in a bad mood?  Don’t despair that I’ll be sad for long; this afternoon I’m sure I’ll feel joy again.  Of course, the reverse is also true, but I’ll take it while I got it.

If the writing session feels long?   Don’t worry, the tomato timer will go off any second now.  

I have a problem: a storage unit full of stuff in Hilversum that we don’t want. I also have no phone, only Skype, which does not make the local equivalent of toll free calls; no car and no friend with a truck that we can borrow; no ability to talk to the man who answers the phone at the equivalent of the Goodwill, whose website promises to pick up your unwanted furniture and household items for free, but not, it seems, a whole lot of stuff.

I am the one who created this problem, which isn’t a big problem when compared to famine, war, or homelessness. This is a first world problem: a storage unit full of stuff that one neither wants nor wants to keep paying the storage cost on.

How did this happen? How did we get the storage unit full of stuff?

Rewind six months.

“Have you decided where you are going to live next year?” my colleagues asked.
“No, not yet,” I replied.

Colleagues asked this question after they read my sabbatical proposal in the fall of 2012. They asked after they read my tenure file in January of 2013. They asked in March as the end of the term came into view. They asked in May and June, whenever they saw me on campus during the quiet Spring/Summer term. I kept giving the same answer. Every time.

“No, not yet.”

In June, at least I could add a second line to my reply.

“Have you decided where you are going to live next year?”
“No, not yet; but I’ve been invited to be a guest scholar at the University of Amsterdam,” I felt relieved to add.

By June, our departure felt imminent, and all of the space before it was occupied with teaching an intense four-week National Writing Project institute. We still didn’t know where we were going to live. I was emailing back and forth with international schools, trying to find and hold five places for our group of American kids, without really knowing which school we would choose. I felt like a college applicant, filling out paperwork, knowing that despite my sincerity on each application, I would in the end only choose one school.

That’s when Ann emailed.

She and her husband and two kids were returning to Canada after a year’s sabbatical. They had rented a house that that was wonderful. It was within walking distance of the international school. The next-door neighbors had children. They also had a bunny, and Caroline loves bunnies. Last year, when I asked Caroline each afternoon of pre-school, in Montessori lingo, what “work” she chose to do that day, she invariably replied that she “held Chester-Uno.” Two years of private preschool tuition gave her the chance to hold the bunny every day, the bunny whose hyphenated name honored the two final contestants of their classroom vote.

Ann’s house would be up for rent again. It was unfurnished when they moved in, as it would be again, unless we wanted to rent the house with all of their stuff still in it. She would send me an Excel spreadsheet of everything that they had bought.

And she did.

It is a lovely Excel workbook with several spreadsheets, one for each room. Each of the six spreadsheets has seven columns: item name, item description, item color, item age, link to sample item online, cost of item to her, cost at which they would sell it to us. Fifty items listed for bedroom use, eighty for the kitchen. My eyes began to swim as I read:
Bread knife
utility knife
cheese slicer
Food chopper, manual
plastic mixing bowls
colander
cutting boards
more cutting boards
salad spinner
stainless steel mixing bowl
clear plastic mixing bowl
metal mixing bowl, whisk and flour shaker
Pyrex baking dish
Pyrex loaf pan
popover baking pan
no-stick baking pan
cooking pot with lid
strainer
potato masher
bowl scrapers, 2
small frypan
Cheese grater

Skimming it, I imagined myself in Ikea, trying to buy what we would need for the year. I felt dizzy. Wouldn’t it be so much simpler just to buy it the whole set from a family who was leaving?

I couldn’t imagine keeping a spreadsheet of everything that I bought, with links to similar items for sale online for the future buyer to review. With organizational skills like that, I trusted Ann implicitly.

She had been given my email by the University of Amsterdam international office, which was responsible for trying to help us find a place to live. Ann immediately shouldered the task, not only explaining over email and Skype the virtues of their neighborhood but also offering cross-city comparisons to the other locations of international schools within a train commuting distance from Amsterdam.

“Hilversum is a wonderful place…” she insisted.

As mentioned, Steve did not want to live in Hilversum. I tried not to feel awkward about my woman-in-the-middle status between these two people with strong opinions.

Not only did it seemed easier to have Ann’s stuff waiting for us than to buy each item at Ikea and elsewhere when we arrived, but it would be cheaper too, because the column of prices to us was generally half of the column of the items’ original costs.

We were indecisive.

Weeks ticked by.

In mid-July Ann and her family were leaving. They needed to know whether to sell their belongings piecemeal, to leave their belongings in the house for us to rent, or to pack everything up in a storage unit for us to retrieve when we arrived.

We still didn’t know where we were going to live. We were debating two unfurnished places in Utrecht–one with lots of square footage in the attic space of a building, the other with great windows but only two real bedrooms and a loft over the dining room.

It’s this moment of decision that we keep going back to. We had to decide. Do we buy their kitchen things, bikes, beds, and couches–or not? I’ve been thinking it through in terms of what it teaches me about my levels of optimism and pessimism. I was pessimistic–anticipating that it would be hard to get what we needed if we moved over with nothing to a country whose language we don’t speak. I was optimistic–anticipating that it wouldn’t be a problem to sell it all again to some other expat family arriving with nothing or to some college students in the city.

So I said yes. Steve said ok. We’ll buy it. $3,000 for everything. Six bicycles, three couches, four beds, an LD HD tv, printer, computer monitor, dining set, desk and shelves, chairs, bedding, a complete kitchen. We had pictures and links to description of most of it. Done.

But we ended up renting a furnished house, not an unfurnished house. We have retrieved and used the bikes, the printer, the twin beds, the tupperware, some sheets. We’ve got the flatscreen tv and widescreen monitor in neat boxes in the corner of our living room–for sale on Markplaats. But we still own a storage unit full of couches, a queen bed and dining room set. I created this problem because it seemed so easy and accommodating to go ahead and say yes to the expat family’s plan to move their belongings into storage for us, with an arrangement with a local Dutch woman to move it into our new house before we arrived, to give us a “soft landing.” Everyone was very caring and forward-thinking: “You don’t want to arrive into an unfurnished (REALLY unfurnished as they are here) house with just your suitcase. We will have a few groceries in the fridge for you, even.”

And the monthly rental cost of the storage unit is going up. And no one is calling about the ads we have placed in the Dutch equivalent of Ebay and on Expat.com. And the Goodwill guys will maybe want it, and they will maybe email me to make an appointment, and in the meantime just wait. It may be two weeks.

It’s not war or famine, but it was a costly choice.

Today the sun came out in the afternoon.  I still took my raincoat with me when I went for a jog, tied around my waist.  By 5:00, however, the sun shone warmly from blue sky.  I didn’t want to go indoors.  We pulled the dry cushions out of the shed and shared a beer on the patio in the garden.

I’ve been wondering for three years why, in a country beset with so much rain, every cafe has terrace seating and every house has patio furniture.  Is it worth it?  Do they really use it?

Today I got it.  When that warm sun shines, there is no way you are going inside.  

It’s raining.  The city, even our garden, feels like a different world, and the pessimist in me thinks that it will never stop.

It’s Saturday, and this morning, Steve and I were able to lie in bed talking for a while.  Margaret was reading.  Caroline was sorting her “treasures” into like-kind piles on the table in the office. (She and Cormac have begun collecting and comparing found objects from cracks in the city’s cobblestone streets.)

“Let’s bike out to that breakfast place near Bunnik,” Steve suggested.

“I had the same idea,” I said, “Do you think it will be too crowded?”

“No one is up and biking by 9 a.m. here,” he replied.

It was still 8:30, and while we showered, Caroline and Margaret came in.

“Do you want to bike out to a pancake place?” I asked them.

“Be careful,” Steve warned, “That’s not quite right.  You might make someone sad when she realizes that she won’t be biking but will be riding in the bakfiets,” [i.e. in the box in front of the cargo-bike].   True to his prediction, Caroline was instantly sad about not being allowed to ride her bike to breakfast.

“It’s not f-a-i-r,” she whined, while collapsing to the ground in protest.

“Can you think of a reason why you can’t bike out to Bunnik?” Steve asked.

“‘Cause I’m just learning to ride my bike and I’m not good enough yet,” Caroline dramatically replied, picking herself up just enough to flop on our bed.

“That’s right,” Steve said.  “It might not seem fair, but is there any way that we can speed you up and make you 8 years old instead of 4?”

“No,” she admitted.

We all rallied, got dressed to shoes and brushed hair and teeth.  Steve and Caroline kept talking, and by the time I went outside with Margaret to unlock our bikes, Caroline informed us that she was going to bike for a while before locking up her bike and riding the rest of the way in the bakfiets.

“That’s ok by me,” I replied.

“But that’s not f-a-i-r,” Margaret began.  “I don’t want to have to keep stopping all of the time.  I want a nice long bike ride with no interruptions.”

“You’ll get it, but you have to be patient,” I said.  “Maybe in 30 minutes you will have a faster bike ride.  It’s an opportunity for delayed gratification.” (Ever since Steve told Margaret about the marshmallow test given to kids and its correlation to adult happiness, she’s had a competitive drive to eat her vegetables first and otherwise build her self-discipline.)

Still not converted to joy, Margaret moped around our lane, complaining for a while, while Steve studied the map and memorized the green bike route all of the way to the Bunnik tea house.  He took the lead on the bakfiets [box-bike], which is built to carry four toddlers or two hundred pounds of potatoes, not for speed.  Margaret followed, and my job was to ride just to the rear-left of Caroline while she hugged the right curb of the designated lanes.

It was a lovely bike ride, which crossed only three intersections the whole way.   After each slow start across one street and at the two traffic signals, Caroline biked smoothly, like she’d been born in the Netherlands.

Here is her report:

“But it turned out that I didn’t even ride in the bakfiets.  And the pancakes were great. There were goats and they licked us, and we fed them leaves ’cause when we first feeded them leaves, they fighted over it, butting each other against the barn. So it turned out that when Mom and Dad were ordering, the goats were fighting over the leaves that we were feeding them, so we kept feeding them leaves.  And then, on the way back from breakfast, we runned over the railroad track, but we had to wait for some bikers and cars to pass us.”

(Me)  “Was it difficult to ride all eight miles to Bunnik and back?”

(Caroline)  “No.  I was just a little bit tired from steering, and my hands were sweaty from holding the handlebars of my bike.  But when we got home, I tied our new jump rope that we got from the festival yesterday [aka last Saturday] by the Domkerk, and I tied it to the swing and it was really fun, but first, before I did that, I swung on our swing lots of different ways, and after that, I did all of this beautiful writing.”

After reading aloud what we have written, she wants to add more:

“One day, when me and Mom and Margaret were staying home, Dad went and climbed the Domkerk, and we were very, very surprised when he told us that he climbed the Domkerk.  So we gave him a big hug and we said, ‘I wish that we could climb the Domkerk some day.’  And I think that my Mom and Dad will let me climb the Domkerk with them someday, and I’m still thinking what day.  And I really think that I miss you Grandma and Grandpa, Love Caroline and Mom.”

While we are here writing in our journal, Steve and Margaret are still out there biking home via a longer route.  And if anyone is wondering, both girls did wear helmets this morning.  Margaret, however, wants you to know that she didn’t want to because “normal Dutch people do not wear helmets.”

I still feel a protective wave of shock every time I see a downy-headed one-year-old riding on the front of his mother’s bike—without a helmet.  Those heads, I have been taught as an educated American mother, hold all of life’s potential.  They are heavy, and they are fragile.  The necks that support them are rather weak, and too much jostling—so the alarming video on shaken baby syndrome that every new mother at Butterworth Hospital is required to watch before discharge—can turn the brain to jello.

I’ve been a firm adherent to rear-facing car seats, five-point harnesses, and bike helmets as a mother for the last eight years.  To date my greatest trauma was seeing my 8 year old’s jagged front adult tooth (in all of its just-grown-in glory), which she broke while riding her bike around the track by our house.  I had taken them to the track to ride their bikes because there were no cars there.

Now Margaret not only has a reconstructed tooth, but she is also here in the Netherlands biking to school during morning rush hour.  Our route is pretty short, but we do have to turn left across oncoming car traffic where there is no stop sign or light.  She has been biking like a pro, despite having an old beater bike with very poor breaking capacity.  She hugs the curb and stays out of the way of the many teenagers biking in groups while talking on their cell phones.  I’ve got Caroline in a seat–without any straps–on the back of my bike.

Today when we got home and were rolling her bike into the shed, Margaret looked up and said.  “Look Mom, I didn’t wear my bike helmet today.  That’s ok, no one else wears one.”

“I know,” I replied.  “I’m still not sure what I think about that.”

* * *

I’ll be thinking more about helmets in coming weeks, reading the lots that has been written about it.  If anyone’s interested, they can see what I mean here: http://study-abroad-blog-amsterdam-ss.ciee.org/2011/03/bike-helmets-the-dutch-have-a-different-philosophy-ciee-amsterdam.html

and

http://joannagoddard.blogspot.nl/2012/04/motherhood-mondays-biking-in-amsterdam.html

Compare those pictures to the self-portraits of the author of that last post back home in America.  Notice that both she and her kid have helmets on, and the kid is totally strapped in:

http://joannagoddard.blogspot.nl/2011/10/motherhood-mondays-riding-bikes-with.html

When dealing with a tight immigration bureaucracy, you don’t miss an appointment.  What if your kids are vomiting when they wake up in the morning, and your required time to appear in person at city hall is at 9 a.m.?  You give them some Zofran, change their clothes, and ask them nicely to walk the ten minutes across town to the appointment.

When you finally make it, after dozens of “how much further” questions, you scan the building for bathrooms.   When your daughter starts looking green while the immigration officer is entering your data into her computer, you politely ask for her trash can (Exhibit A: trash can sitting next to me on the floor).  After your child throws up in the trash can and the appointment is over, you ask the immigration officer where to clean it or leave it on your way out.

The good news is that as of the middle of last week, all of our immigration appointments are behind us.  Our months of meetings and collecting apostilles on our birth certificates and marriage license ended with our being told to wait for a few weeks for our BSN number to arrive in the mail.  It may be the first letter to arrive in our box actually addressed to us.  With it, we can open a local bank account and purchase a cell phone.  Our American credit card is useful only in sporadic restaurants, but not accepted in the train station or the grocery stores.   We have been on an cash-only budget since we arrived.

Tuesday is the first day of school and my first appointment with the Department of Argumentation and Rhetoric.  I feel like giving us all safe foods like broth and juice tomorrow, just in case.

Yesterday we went to the Artis Royal Zoo.  I loved it, and the kids did too.  When asked on the train what her favorite parts were, Caroline mentioned the lion roaring, the apes wrestling, the giraffes just sitting around, and the monkey who threw poop (yes, she has a four-year-old ear for comic effect).  It helped that many of the animals had delivered babies this summer, so many groups had playful pups to watch wrestle and frolic.  There was also a playground with nets to climb and slides to descend. When Margaret saw it, she said, “I love monkeys.  I’m going to climb and swing just like a monkey.”  And she did–to the tune of blisters on one hand and an open sore on the other.  The Artis is not a collection of smelly buildings.  It’s a beautiful botanical garden, with interesting old houses and glassed enclosures across what seemed to be an old estate.  Add healthy and extremely diverse species, great food service (Heiniken, panini, and poffertjes anyone?), and you get an amazing zoo.

“This doesn’t feel like a day in Amsterdam,” Becky commented, as we as we strolled under a canopy of huge sycamores.  It’s true.  Amsterdam has so many faces.  Leaving the train station to walk almost anywhere, our kids are going to encounter marijuana, cheap hotels and sex shops, even if we avoid the big windows of the Red Light District itself.  But walk two blocks in the other direction to find endless high end shops, restaurants, and picturesque tree-lined canal streets of steeply roofed old Dutch row houses.  Walk further and you spend the day learning about either Dutch Masters or Van Gogh in museums to daunt even the heartiest aficionado.  Head back to the water and you get the best of new urban design–architecture that reclaims or reinvents four walls and a roof.  Yes, there are houseboats and bike paths, trams to hop and tulips to buy.  There are also offices, classrooms, schools, and plenty of construction sites.

When the sun is out, the city is bright: dappled light from water and glass, leaves and bricks, white and red paint.  Yesterday was sunny–as have been the other six days in my life when I’ve walked around Amsterdam.  Being here a year–including a winter–I know I will learn another Amsterdam.  I’ll learn the working world and the cozy bars and pancake shops into which one can retreat from the drizzle.  Maybe by then I’ll be able to pronounce “gezellig.”

This morning I write from the floor of our entry way.  The rest of the rooms of our house are full of silently sleeping bodies recovering from jet lag.  Even the living room couch is occupied.  I hope our realtor doesn’t surprise us this morning for the before-you-move-in inspection that we have yet to schedule.

Our friends from Grand Rapids, Brian and Becky and their three kids, arrived Monday.  They, too, are taking family sabbatical year and enrolling their kids in the international school.  It’s been a fun house party this last day and a half while they wait for their rental agreement to begin this afternoon.

Brian and Becky are part of our church “household,” a group familiar with house parties thanks to the generosity and hospitality of the Loeks family, who have a rambling Victorian era house on Lake Michigan into which we can all fit for a weekend.  Being here together is reminiscent of those weekends at the cottage–except that this house is way smaller, there is no beach, and we all have the disorienting sense that life as we know it will not pick back up on Monday.

All of the adults have been amazed that our little back garden can entertain the kids for so long.  Among us Americans, there are five.  Add the neighbors’ kids who have come over, and sometimes the garden and back path have ten or so, teaching each other Yes/No & Ja/Nee with the level of repetition that only toddlers enjoy. They have collected snails and slugs to make a terrarium, tied toddler bikes together to make a train, and played endless games that look like land-locked Sharks and Minnows, i.e. try-not-to-get-hit-by-the-person-swinging-on-the-swing.  Needless to say, I can’t watch.

The weather has been beautiful.  Not only did it not rain yesterday, but there was never a cloud in the sky.  This is the kind of mild and sunny that suckers you into thinking “I want to live here forever!” and we’re counting each moment a blessing because we know that the darkness and the drizzle are coming soon.

The wonderful weather means that all of the kids and families are milling around the back gardens in the afternoons.  We have met more neighbors than I can remember, and I am immensely grateful that the homeowners left behind a list of everyone’s names and kids’ names on the house-care instruction sheet.

All of this celebratory togetherness has made me remember living in East Lake Commons, a co-housing community in Atlanta to which I moved when I was 26.  Strolling around the commons, it wasn’t unusual to spend an hour talking to neighbors before finally reaching your destination.  This led some neighbors to begin wearing red bandanas when they wanted to go for a walk for exercise.  At one of the weekly community meetings, the sign of the bandana was explained: “Please don’t take it personally that I don’t stop and talk to you; I just want to go for a walk without stopping.”  Within weeks, the community list serve was full of knock-offs:  “If I’m wearing a blue bandana, it means that I’m hungry and too lazy to cook and I’m hoping you will invite me over for dinner.”  “If I’m wearing a pink bandana, I’m looking for a babysitter.”  “If I’m wearing a green bandana, I’m feeling horny.”  The bandana phenomena died a swift death through mockery.

Yesterday, I didn’t pull a bandana out of my suitcase; I merely told Steve that I wanted to go work.  While everyone else went to a medieval music festival at the Dom Kerk and to lunch, I went to the university library reading room.  It was excellent to feel like a grad student again, reading off and on for several hours (and taking ham and cheese pastry breaks) before taking the long stroll home.

I love community.  It means that I can leave everyone else in each other’s good company and go be alone for a few hours without guilt.

Yesterday we rented paddle boats and circumnavigated the medieval centrum–the first time of many, I anticipate, looking at our schedule of visitors.  It is good exercise, and there was infinitely more to see than I could manage while (a) reading even the sparse guide provided by the company while (b) making sandwich bread and Gouda fold-overs for my three family members and (c) trying to coach Margaret not to lead her head out of a moving boat while looking backwards, lest she get knocked on the noggin by a low hanging branch, statue, or bridge pylon.

OK, I admitted it several times to Steve yesterday: I was passionately reluctant to let go of the bird in the hand that we were offered with the furnished rental house and places at the good international school in another city.  That bird, however, was a chicken compared to the peacock of Utrecht and our a house here.  Sometimes, life is teaching me, it is better to wait patiently for the one in the bush.