Lindsay Maddox Ellis

I am not a baker.  I am not even a cook.  These last eight years, since the birth of Margaret, I have let food preparation serve singularly utilitarian ends.  I noticed early on that Margaret would rather play with me after work than watch me cook.  Likewise, I would rather spend time with her than spend time cooking.  So it went.  Then, with two children at sponge-like developmental ages, I began thinking of meals as learning opportunities: carbohydrates, proteins, fruits, vegetables, and fats.  These are the building blocks of our meals.  I wanted the girls to understand this concept and to develop awareness of which bites were which.  Once, when we went to a paint your own pottery studio for a school assignment (M had read A Single Shard and was learning about Chinese pottery and celadon glazes), I bought three oversized baby food plates on a whim.  The plates were divided into three sections, similar to the USDA My Plate illustration.  Showing the girls what I was doing, I painted the biggest section green for fruits and vegetables, the next one orange for carbs, and the final section brown for protein. (Yes, I had fun choosing colors and hues; I like crafting.)  The girls chose their own colors for their three sections, and we spent a merry hour painting together.  After they were fired and returned to us, we’ve been using those plates for two years.  Sometimes dinner can’t be so neatly separated into three sections, but more often than not, if I’m the parent who is not at work–it can.

“Girls, what do you want our fruits and vegetables to be tonight for dinner,” I ask, head in the refrigerator. “We have a head of broccoli, some carrots, and some green beans.”

“Carrot sticks!” Caroline yells, “And nothing else!”

“We need one more,” I reply.

“Fine, apple slices too.”

Despite the fact that these are the fruits and vegetables in her lunch every day that week–and most weeks, I agree.  It is, after all, 6:30, and I want to be done with dinner by 7.

“And what for carbohydrate?”

“Bread,” shouts Margaret.

“Pasta,” chimes Caroline.

“Tonight, bread with olive oil,” I arbitrate.  “And what for protein?  Veggie burger, hummus, salmon?”

“Hummus,” replies Caroline.

“That will do.  Who wants to peel the carrots?”  And dinner is on the table in ten minutes.

When people wonder how I work and still spend time with my kids, I want to share the secret of not cooking.  It’s a beautiful thing.  We eat sliced cucumbers, cherry tomatoes off the vine outside, and lots of fresh bread from Nantucket Bakery.  No one’s complaining.  Over the course of a relaxed week, I might grill some fish, steam some broccoli, boil pasta, even make pesto by throwing parmesan, pecans, olive oil, and basil from our garden into the cuisinart–but nothing takes me longer than 15 minutes.  Five ingredients is about my limit, and we eat a lot of fruits and vegetables raw. (My other secret is that Steve is a self-proclaimed and territorial expert dish washer and grocery shopper.)

So, that’s the context for yesterday.  What, we wondered, should we do on our first day of our new life in Utrecht?  I just wanted to walk around all day.  The girls wanted to see their new school.  It wasn’t raining (yet), so we set off to walk the winding route to their new school in order to see how long it would take us.  Turns out, although we traversed two bridges over canals, one railroad, and a petting zoo, it wasn’t far.  We headed home another route (always curious if there’s a better way), and our foot path along the railroad track took us by a private vegetable garden, complete with pecking hens, across another small canal, and by a construction site whose fence was lined with blackberry bushes in full fruit.  In fact, the blackberry bushes were most laden just beyond the barrier keeping humans from falling into the canal.

Steve was undeterred.

He climbed the fence, squeezed through the barrier, and picked berries along the dangerously steep wall between canal and construction site.  The girls, of course, wanted to come too.

“I wish I had something to put these in,” Steve mused, while giving us what he picked.  Because all of this bounty was only about two hundred yards (and across three canals) from our house, it wasn’t long before we were home and Steve found two canisters in the pantry. (As of yet the house’s contents are still a treasure hunt.)

Back on the footpath by the railroad track, we set to work picking berries.  As usual, I looked around for alternatives to the act that involved danger.  I found another bush accessible from the bridge and held the branch for Caroline to pick clean.  I also started thinking about what we would do with all of these berries.  Steve, as anyone who knows him is aware, sees picking fruit as a chance to get every last one, risk/benefit ratio be damned.  I knew we would go home with more than we could eat raw, even with the best yogurt that Europe has to offer.

Baking came to mind, which is a sign to me that something new has begun. Specifically, flaky, buttery crust came to mind.  That said, baking a pie did not come to mind.  Juggling a don’t-rip-it top crust, handling that much dough in general, is still beyond my ability and interest.   But a galette–a crust with edges merely pinched up roughly to hold the fruit–that sounded perfect.

Willing to forfeit the fruit-picking competition before even getting in the game, I returned home with Caroline to search for “blackberry galette” on the IPad.  Google gave me a bounty of choices, and I knew immediately which one I wanted to make.

Although I am not a baker or a chef, I’m related to women who read cookbooks for pleasure.  My sister Florida told me once that I’d really enjoy reading Nigella Lawson’s prose.  The intro to her recipe had me at “free-form” and sealed the deal at “rebelling”:

This is really a free-form pizza-like tart, which I made for the first time while we were doing the photography for How To Be A Domestic Goddess. We happened to have some polenta pastry left over and some spare blackberries in the fridge and I, suddenly rebelling against the planning and rule-following necessary to get all the food photographed, played around.  (http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/blackberry-galette-151)

The mention of cornmeal made my mouth water.  Back in college, there was a bakery in Glen Ellen called Spice and Easy that made the most amazing blackberry cornmeal muffins.  It was worth a jog from Wheaton to Glen Ellen and home again carrying a waxed paper bag awkwardly in one’s hand just to have a Spice and Easy muffin.  At my ten year college reunion, I almost wept to see the storefront occupied by a Starbucks.

It took us two trips to the store and the effortless help of a grocery stocker (who was doubtful that his impeccable English was good enough) to locate cornmeal.  Thanks to the first trip, we can also now cook things with cornstarch.

It took us several minutes of engineering experimentation to assemble a small food processor from the melange of parts in the drawer.

I was set.

When I asked the girls if they would like to help me make a blackberry galette, Margaret replied that “cooking is like a chore.” This particular something new hasn’t dawned in her yet.

Steve, ever generous, asked if I’d like to make two–one to give as hospitality to our neighbors.  Sure I can.

Alone in the kitchen area while the girls practiced headstands on the couch ten feet away, I diced cold butter and pulsed it into the dry ingredients.

I divided and wrapped the dough in “cling-form” and refrigerated the two small disks.  I did the dishes.  Steve helped me figure out how to navigate the digital oven display to preheat.  I pulled the first packet from the fridge and found it sticky and in need of additional flour to roll out.  “Needs to be colder,” I thought, and put the second one in the freezer while I worked the first.

With one galette waiting to bake on the windowsill, I went for the second dough disk, only to find it frozen solid.  First mistake.

It warmed pretty quickly in my hands and I did better this time by leaving the saran wrap between the dough and the rolling pin, forming the crust directly on the baking paper that the recipe called for and that I was delighted to find in the drawer.

With both galettes filled and pinched, I popped them in the oven, only to realize once I relaxed that I had forgotten to sprinkle the requisite tablespoon of sugar to the top of the second one.  Second mistake.

Like the keep-it-simple-stupid cook that I am, I got the spoonful, opened the oven, and ever so carefully tried to sprinkle the lot without getting burned.  Most of the sugar ended up in two piles on the tart, but good enough.   Give the kids those pieces.

We ate dinner–a lovely salmon simmered in korma.  Steve had been concocting while I baked.  (In the absence of a wife who cooks, my man has taught himself.)  As we dished up seconds, I wondered why the timer on the oven hadn’t gone off.  The galettes were only supposed to bake for 20 minutes.

Upon inspection, they appeared to have been merely warming, rather than baking, during our dinner.  Warming isn’t good for butter-based crusts.  The butter, shall we say, kind of melts.  The digital oven must have turned off when I opened the door to apply the last tablespoonful of sugar.  Third mistake.

After applying reason then sheer volume of persistent button punching to the digital oven display, I still had no idea how to get the oven back up to temperature.  I applied my when-in-doubt-reboot computer strategy to the appliance and tried a different setting on the picture wheel not in my language.  Another twenty minutes gave us slightly flat, whoops I lost some juice, blackberry cornmeal tart. Would Nigella be proud?

All I can say is that I really enjoyed it.  After the girls’ baths, we indulged in dessert, and I decided that the second galette was really not visually attractive enough to share with a neighbor.  We gave them a bowl of raw berries instead.

Let’s be realistic; that seems like an authentic gift.

It all went well. When we arrived, we were swift to repack our carry-on chaos and deplane. No one fell down the stairs to the tarmac. Caroline did not throw up on the bus that shuttled us to the terminal. All of our four checked bags appeared promptly. Steve’s cell phone could access the internet after rebooting, and we could find online directions to the Utrecht Taxi desk. They had our reservation, and the driver arrived within ten minutes. Our driver was an honest and interesting conversationalist from Kabul, Afghanistan. Though his van couldn’t make it onto our narrow lane in medieval Utrecht Centrum, he found it on the second try and we only had to lug our baggage 25 yards to our front door, where our realtor and the homeowners were waiting with flowers, wine, espresso, bread, ham, cheese, and fruit to show us around our amazing rental. Within hours, our kids were in bathing suits, frolicking with the neighbor kids in their back garden sprinkler. Our neighbor came over to ask what our policies were concerning snacks given between meals. “We generally say no candy, but we give each other’s children a rice cracker or something to drink,” she shared. “If the garden gate is open, that means the kids can come in to play. If it’s closed, then the family is going out.” The ten houses on our block share a locked back garden divided into plots, so the kids can safely play in the whole area without traffic, dogs, or passersby. This, need I write it, is a house more wonderful than we could have imagined. Also, the sun was shining. Over dinner al fresco on the patio, I taught the girls what the phrase “I’m pinching myself” connotes.

Twitchy legs. That’s the worst part about overseas travel to me. I don’t like being up in an airplane over the ocean. When I think about our height, I begin to feel vertiginous. My stomach can drop, imagining a sudden descent. But I can handle fear through distraction. I know if I dwell on the miracle of flight, I can work myself up into terror, so I don’t. I read. I talk. I walk to the bathroom and back. I watch movies. I even try to sleep–every time–and it never works. My worst overseas flight memory is from high school, sitting with my sister and trying valiantly to follow my parents’ coaching to sleep. We shifted positions endlessly. I dropped off a few times, only to groggily resurface to discomfort too annoying to ignore. It was a miserable five hours of sustained effort and failure.

Yesterday I was prepared with all of the props for airplane sleep: eye mask, inflatable neck pillow, boring non-fiction book, and extreme fatigue. It had been a long day of packing and cleaning the house. Our big flight left Detroit at 7:30 p.m. The seat reclined successfully. The headrest had wings, which, combined with the pillow, eliminated head bobbing. My feet were elevated a few inches, resting on the backpack stowed under the seat ahead. Steve was on kid-duty–strategically placed between me and their needy requests. I was set.

All for naught. I reclined and practiced mindful muscle relaxation for a while–until the twitchy feeling in my feet and legs got too unbearable. I don’t know if this is what people with certifiable “restless leg syndrome” experience while lying in bed–but if so, God bless them. It was awful. Margaret suffers from the same feeling. “Mom, my feet just don’t feel right,” she explained after obeying my coaching to try sleep for a while. Our only escape was just to choose a movie and, once again, get distracted.

So here I could review two films: Adjustment Bureau and Admissions (starring Tina Fey). Neither were stellar, but both did their job. I was dutifully entertained. I began the novel that Christina gave me (so thankful for friends!). I enjoyed my dinner, and I switched places so as to become a comfort pillow for the girls on either side of me. I was nauseatingly tired until the two cups of coffee served with breakfast, and then I made it well enough until bedtime in Utrecht, in our new house, at 8 p.m. We slept until 7:30 a.m., and I feel just fine. Airplane travel is a miracle.

It was a dark night on the bus to Barcelona.  Not merely the sky, but my inner landscape too was bleak.  Tears dripped onto my shirt.

Our flight from Groningen had landed at 9:30 p.m.–an hour after the girls’ latest bedtime.  The bus to the Groningen airport had been long, as was the wait in the terminal, and the flight itself.  It had been a long day of not much.

Caroline had curled up on my lap and slept throughout the flight.  I had to wake her to get her off of the plane, and she wept as I carried her down the aisle.  We descended the plane and walked through the terminal.

“How far away is the hotel?” I asked Steve.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What?”  I replied, feeling angry as I held our crying child that he hadn’t done more research to know what the plan was.

He went to ask a professional.

When he returned, he gently informed me, “We have to take a bus downtown and then a taxi to the hotel.  The bus ride will take an hour and costs 16 euros per person, or we can take a taxi straight to the hotel.”

I stared at him.  I wanted Caroline to go back to sleep–both girls to go to sleep.  It was all I wanted, and I had little energy for the actual debate between bad choices as we walked up to the ticket booth for the bus.  The woman at the bus kiosk heard me waver and jumped in, “You want to take the bus.  Much less expensive.  Here, buy tickets.”

I felt rushed and pressured.  The bus was loading, and I didn’t want to miss it.  When would the next one even be available?

I just wanted to get into a quiet car and have it smoothly drive us to our beds.   I just wanted it to be easier, to get into one vehicle so that the girls could lie down and go to sleep. Instead, we purchased tickets.

We stowed our luggage in the compartments under the bus and climbed on.  It was blessedly dark and cool.  And crowded.  Every seat on the bus was taken.  I saw single seats free.  The driver pulled away from the curb, so I told Margaret to sit down with a stranger.  In the dark.  On a bus in Spain.  Well after her bedtime.  I dragged my feet away from Margaret down the narrow aisle, holding Caroline’s hand, looking for more empty seats. I told her to sit down; seeing two seats one behind the other, so at least I was close.  She was scared and tired.  Steve saw one open by the window a few rows back and sat down. “Let me know how I can help,” he said.  “I can hold Caroline if you want.”

The woman sitting next to me offered to switch places so that I could sit with the girls.  I walked forward to ask Margaret if she wanted to come backwards.

“YES!” she replied with wide, scared eyes.  By the time I got back to my row, the woman had switched seats, so now there were two together, for three of us.  I sat down with Caroline on my lap and Margaret by my side.  It was infinitely better.  Still, the tears rolled down my cheeks.  I was on a bus that would last an hour, after dark, in Spain, with my kids up way past their bedtimes.

Tears of what?  Anger?  Frustration?  Guilt?  This wasn’t my plan and I wasn’t having a good time.

“This was a mistake,” was all I could think.  Coming to Spain for two nights was a mistake.  Getting on the bus was a mistake.

Caroline was restless.  I wanted her to go to sleep, so I took her back the few rows to Steve.  She went to him without complaint, and sure enough, settled in to sleep.

Margaret and I sat, holding hands, and I fished for music on two sets of headphones.  That meant that she wouldn’t sleep, but we were together.  I tried to exhale, and being alone with her, I could.

“Moving your family overseas for a year?  You’re crazy,” Amy Holmes said to me this morning when I visited her writing camp.

Is it crazy?  Is it a mistake, like our late night bus to Barcelona felt at the time?  I have to be able to explain why a certain choice is the right one for me, even if this explanation is only to silence my own inner critic.  When I look inward for my major justification, it is this: I want to remember.

Six years ago, I flew with Steve, my in-laws, and 23 month-old Margaret to Taipei, then to Palau and back to Taiwan.  I can remember the clothes Margaret wore, the shape of her body in my lap on the plane, the way she conversed, the pull of the sling when I carried her on my hip, her irrationally confident steps around the swimming pool, the splash of her submersion, the weight of thirty pounds in my arms as she squealed with delight and asked to go under again.  Margaret turned two on that trip.  I remember that she wanted to go to sleep before we cut into her birthday cake, sitting at a long table in my sister’s carport on a Pacific island, chickens clucking around our feet.  I remember it better than the other 49 weeks of that year.

Travel does that.  The tastes of Taiwan are indelible, and sealed up with them in the package of that vacation is a portrait of Margaret during that three week window.  Travel also pulls us together. On that trip, Margaret was giddy with joy at sharing a room and every day with both parents and two grandparents for three weeks.   Why an overseas sabbatical?  Because when we hold hands on the bus, I will remember the shapes of their fingers.

Yesterday it was raining.  I packed the kids off to camp and wondered how they would like songs in the dining hall all day.  Steve and I argued about blinds for the living room in the five minutes before I ran out the door to teach. (My negotiation skills were half-baked under the pressure of needing to get ready to lead the Institute.)  I left for work in a grumpy mood.  When I sat down to freewrite during the ISI’s Sacred Writing Time, all I had were a series of existential questions:

• Where does happiness come from?
• Should I expect to be happy?  Should I work at being happy?
• Is happiness a good goal for life?
• What about sadness?
• Should I be someone who mourns?
• Is sad an ok way to be in the world as an adult?
• Do we get to choose?

Then I started digging a little deeper.  I asked myself, “What is it that I want to give my children?  Do I want to give them sadness?”  Then I was off and running. No, I want to give them a realistic balance of emotions, with deep joy and peace and love as our emotional posture at rest–our posture at ease.  So where do deep joy and peace and love come from? For centuries, two millennia actually, a growing number of people have looked to God as revealed in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth as the source of deep joy and peace and love.  Steve, my husband, my life long partner and lover, is increasingly skeptical. That leaves me alone in my question about whether God and prayer to be “filled with the Spirit of God” is the best choice for my daily effort to have love, joy, and peace be my default mode, my posture at ease. I’m surprised that at 40 I’m back at square one, with questions I have thought about, but not deeply considered, since about fifth grade, when I remember sitting in church and thinking, “Maybe I’m Jewish.  I believe in God, but I’m not sure about all of this Jesus stuff.” Later that year, I went on my first youth group retreat; and while singing “You Are My Hiding Place,” I had an experience of the love, joy, and peace of God that I wanted to hold onto.  I wanted to stay in that love, to live in it, to be able to move about and have it follow me. And I have.  Leaving a classroom after teaching these days, I routinely pray.  It sounds something like “God, take that small clay pot of my effort to teach and use it for good.  My life is hidden in you, and I feel so fortunate that you just keep asking me to show up and be faithful with giving of myself to help other people.  I may not succeed, but I can keep showing up and using my mind and body to teach.  That’s what I feel called to do, and I’ll claim that vocation and offer my efforts as a thank you for being alive on your earth.” That’s it.  That’s my prayer, such a comfort in the face of performance anxiety and existential doubt. “Thank you for the chance to be here.  Take this effort as my offering of thanks.”

So which comes first, a rational belief in God or an experience of God?  To what extent can we trust experiences, when human religious experiences vary so dramatically. (This question is what motivated psychologist William James to write about The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1901.)  I don’t trust my experience as objective testimony, but I do trust it as subjective testimony.  I don’t need objective Truth to construct a life that has a firm foundation.  I need instead to construct a life based upon honest and careful cycles of observation, reflection, theory-building, hypothesizing, experimentation/action, observation, reflection, theory-building, hypothesizing, experimentation/action…..and on and on.  All I can do is be honest about what I see “working” or not working in the socially constructed world that I experience and observe. What I believe is that holding and being held by my family members is about the best thing in human existence.  Love, honesty, and forgiveness lead to joy and peace.  Those are big words for concrete things like holding hands, reading books together with our heads on the same pillow, and going for a jog together while talking about what’s on our minds.  These give me a spring in my step and the gut desire to pray. “Thank you for the chance to be here.  Take this effort as my offering of thanks.”

Tuesday, before flying home to Grand Rapids from Atlanta, Steve and I went and sat in my parents’ library.  The library was the “I have something serious and private that I want to talk to you about” room growing up (also good for studying for exams).  We had about a five minute conversation, during which I asked Steve, point-blank, to make a decision about where to live.

“I need to know, and you’re leaving,” I said.  This was it.

“OK, we’ll live in Weesp,” he replied.

The next morning, I found him at the computer, measuring distances from the train station to the school in Almere.  “It’s not as close as I thought,” he said.  I held my breath and hoped he would change his mind.

He left.  Wednesday morning on the phone, I asked if he’d had any new thoughts about our decision.  His answer: nothing game changing.  Weesp was the best option.

Then I got an email.

It was a game changer.

The International School Utrecht finally returned my query about whether they had spaces for our children.  After hearing nothing from them for two months, I had closed that door.  But no.  The answer was yes.  Yes, they did.  I dialed the international number just to hear a voice say it in person.

This is our Third Way.  

We can live in Utrecht, within walking distance of our kids’ school and the central train station.  It is an old European city with a vibrant university culture, canals, and green spaces.  It is a 27 minute train to Amsterdam.  (Weesp was a 17 minute ride and Hilversum was a 20 minute ride, but I can handle 10 more minutes with a smile.)

Now we have to agree on which house to rent.  We have identified three that we like, based on the realtors’ photos and descriptions–all viable options.  Perhaps only one will work out, or perhaps it’s time to buy more sticky notes.

This week, we were in Atlanta, visiting my family, and Steve and I were deep in the thicket of civil argument over where to live.  We followed the rules of principled negotiation and prioritized our interests.  I made it into a game in order to help us out of our impasse.  We organized sticky-notes of interests hierarchically on the window panes of my parent’s breakfast room.  I put green stickers on the ones that we prioritized equally.  The number of green stickers was rather amazing, and I was touched that Steve prioritized the travel time from the University of Amsterdam to the kids’ school at the top.

Here’s the thing: after ranking and sharing a few words about our interests, we weren’t any closer to consensus.  My second highest priority, after travel time, is living within walking distance of the girls’ school so that we can be a part of the school culture and community, surrounded by Dutch families with children to get to know.  The house next door whose kids have a pet bunny in the garden put my decision (for Hilversum) over the top. Steve’s second highest priority is urban design and architecture–living in urban old Europe rather than in what might feel like a suburb. (That means he ranks Weesp and Alkmaar over Hilversum.)

I am struck by the truth of this reviewer’s comments on the Amazon page for Fisher and Ury’s (1981) book, Getting to Yes:

“There are no secrets to negotiating, but it is an art form. You need to exercise total self-control, suppress your ego, and focus on the task at hand. You need to empathize with the side you’re negotiating with, and figure out how to best arrive at a mutually satisfactory agreement. You need to hold firm, while at the same time understanding that reaching an agreement is what’s important, and that ultimately everything can and need be sacrificed in order to reach an agreement, because the consequences of not reaching an agreement are unbearable — and that takes a firm hold of reality.” (By Jiang Xueqin)

Unbearable consequences.  Ouch.

I’ve made up my mind.  I have a clear sense, given the comparisons and contrasts among cities, about where I want to live.  There’s just one problem.  I’m not making this decision alone.  In fact, I told Steve that because I put the pin on the map in Amsterdam because of my career, he could choose where he wanted to live within commuting distance of the university.  Do I keep my mouth shut and hope for the best?  That’s not exactly in my nature.

In their classic book on negotiating, Getting to Yes, Fisher and Ury (1981) suggest separating the “issues” from the “positions.”  They also insist that negotiators should not get personal and attack the other’s personality (definitely good advice in a marriage).  They advise: don’t even go head to head with positions and counter-positions.  First, dig down deep to discover the interests of each party, and then find a win-win solution.  So what are all of our interests?  I will try to unify us rather than to make his and hers lists.  If we’re in this together, seeking the best possible solution to our question of where to live, then I should be looking to make the items on Steve’s list come true too.

I’ll also try to prioritize the list in terms of importance.  This is my perception.  It is a good guess that Steve might prioritize these differently.

1. I want to be able to get from the girls’ school to the University of Amsterdam and back in a reasonable time.  If one of them gets hurt on the playground and they call me, I want to be there as quickly as possible.

• From office in Amsterdam to Bergen school: 15 minute tram + 36 minute train + 26 minute bike = 75 minutes. (That feels like a long time to wait for your mommy if you vomited at school or broke your arm on the playground.)
• From office to Almere school: 15 minute tram + 30 minute train + 6 minute bike = 51 minutes
• From office to Hilversum school: 15 minute tram + 21 (37 every other 15 minutes) minute train? + 5 minute bike ride? = 41 minutes

2. Live where we can enjoy a car-free life with easy access to bakery, shops, recreation, school, restaurants, and a train station to visit other places.

I think that we have narrowed our list pretty well to have cities that fit this criteria.  Our biggest discussion around this was whether we would like to live in the village of Bergen itself, near the European school.  Bergen does have some shops and restaurants.  It’s known as an artists’ and writers’ hamlet.  Unfortunately, it would not offer a year’s worth of restaurants and museums to explore, and to visit other cities would require the 25 minute bike ride to Alkmaar right at the outset.

3. Live where we can take scenic and interesting longer bike rides.

Again, both Alkmaar and Hilversum fit this criteria.  Hilversum is surrounded by forests and heather fields, and Alkmaar sits on a nice bike route across the dunes to the North Sea.   There are more towns and cities near Hilversum to bike to than there are up on the peninsula where Alkmaar is located.

4. Live in a beautiful town with old European urban design and architecture.

This is where Hilversum comes in last in a cross-city comparison.  It has interesting 20th century architecture, but not an old European center.  Alkmaar is strikingly old-world.  Travel blogs describe it as almost too lovely to be true–a Brigadoon of canals and old Dutch architecture.  Weesp, one option of where to live if the girls went to the Almere school, is a small village with canals and well-kept homes just outside Amsterdam.  It is lovely too.  Hilversum has trees and nice neighborhoods, but not an old-Dutch center with canals and row houses.

Personally, I’ll be heading into Amsterdam a few times a week, so I’ll be getting my fill of canals and row houses there.  I hope to learn my favorite routes from the train station to the university, and enjoying that lovely city every week.  I hope, too, to spend sunny weekends taking bike rides to have lunch or a beer in lots of towns around the country, and going to Amsterdam or Utrecht for date nights with Steve.  I’m thus fine with green neighborhoods in Hilversum for weekday living within walking distance of the girls’ school and the train station with an Intercity train into Amsterdam and Utrecht.

5. Live close enough to the girls’ school where they can have play dates and feel like they are getting to know the community of other families.

6. Live where we can make interesting friends and learn about Dutch culture.

Certainly, part of moving somewhere for a family sabbatical (or a year abroad at any time) is getting to know actual people who live where you go.  I was so fortunate, when I studied in Sydney, Australia for a semester in college, to befriend an Australian who swam laps at the university pool when I did.  Once we established clear friendship-only boundaries, he became my tour guide of his life in Sydney: art openings, concerts at the opera house, hikes in the national parks, and great restaurants not in the university neighborhood.   Also in college I travelled to Sri Lanka with a classmate to live with her extended family.  Living with a family is just infinitely different than staying in a hotel as a tourist.  We swam at their neighborhood pool, tutored kids after school, and ate at home around the table together.

Next year, I’m eager to get to know a few Dutch nationals well–both scholars and young families. I want to get beyond the surfaces of an afternoon’s tour guide.

Saturday, June 15

Two months to go, and we still haven’t decided in which city to live.  We have now applied at three international schools for Em and Cee: the European School in Bergen, the Violenschool in Hilversum, and the Letterland Primary school in Almere.  Unfortunately, Steve doesn’t want to spend his only year living in Europe in either Bergen, Hilversum, or Almere.  None of them are old cities with Medieval or pre-industrial urban plans.  Understandably, he wants our year in Europe to be different.  He wants to live in a different landscape, to fully escape an auto-dependent suburban lifestyle. 

As we try to make a decision about which city in which to live, I’m reminded of my own work with groups of students, trying to listen for the underlying warrants that support their arguments.  If Steve’s claim is, “I don’t want to live in X,” what warrants undergird this statement?  What warrants underlie the claims I am making too?  Let’s face it, negotiating with another human, where a single consensual decision is required, is difficult. 

I find it fitting that while my field has been incorporating methods of conflict resolution into the teaching of argumentation, there has been so much conflict of opinion and civil argumentation in my marriage.  I have suggested on many occasions that teachers can teach conflict resolution and finding win-win solutions to conflicts of interest through writing instruction.  If it is difficult to construct consensus through discourse even in a marriage, is it possible in wider society?